Check out my video essay for a teaser of what's to come in the blog!
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is yet fully understood by public relations. It is a dimension as vast as the imagination and as instant as light. It is the middle ground between the organization and the individual, between science and intuition, and it lies between the pit of humankind’s flaws, and the summit of its capabilities. This is the dimension of invention. It is an area which we call ... The Social Media Zone. duh-Duh-DUH!
The Premise
"The Twilight Zone" returned to airwaves on April 1, 2019 with "The Comedian." CBS ditched the antennas for YouTube to deliver the tale of a struggling standup, Samir Wassan, who will go to no end for the allure of fame. Nonetheless, Jordan Peele's fresh take on Rod Serling's anthology spook-fest combines mysterious storytelling, brilliant acting and contemporary anxieties to tell a story that is both a timeless study into the human condition and a prescient critique of today's social climate.
Social Currency
In a prior blog, I explored the "The Sopranos" finale and its ability to harness social currency as a means to create lasting digital conversations. According to Gina Luttrell, social currency is the human "want to be thought highly of by those around them" ("Social Media: How to Engage, Share, and Connect, p. 146). Often innocuous, social currency typically rears its head through celebrity news, the sharing of memes and thoughtful perspectives on trending issues. However, Wassan's tragic rise and fall reveals a dark side to social currency in 2019. SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
As the story shows, Wassan, a comic whose awkward Second Amendment bit and mopey attitude is wearing thin on audiences and other club talent, had a lucky break when he bumped into a legendary comedian that inspired his career at the bar. Wanting to be thought highly of by club audiences and other comics, asks for a piece of advice. The star comedian gave him a cheap trick to instant success: inject personal issues into the bit.
The crowd eats up Wassan's new material, which airs grievances with the people in his own life, and the comic quickly ascends in the stand up scene with a fat wallet and an opportunity at a TV gig.
One problem: anyone that Wassan mentions in his bit is erased from existence once he exits stage.
Call Out Culture:
Soon, Wassan becomes drunk on the power to banish those who've crossed him from his life and the cheap cackles from audiences, which reveals a dark side to social currency: call out culture.
This is the behavior wherein one actively and publicly calls-out speech that is deemed problematic in a way that upends the status quo of the speaker. Typically, call-out culture takes form in aggressive quote tweets, quippy Instagram comments or lengthy Facebook posts targeted at those deemed problematic.
Rachel Wayne diagnosed the issue with call-outs as such on Medium, "call-out culture pretends to be activism while actually just assuaging the insecurities... of someone looking to convince others of their rightness."
Indeed, Wassan's vanishing power begins with righteous intent on stage, in one particular instance shaming and erasing another comic who killed a family as a drunk driver. However, the material spins into a laundry list of Wassan's anger as he calls-out increasingly minor infractions of high school nemeses, like a twisted burn book.
Tying it back to social currency, Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, sees call out culture as a deeper social chasm; "it’s if you can possibly interpret someone else’s words in the worst possible way, you should do so because that’s how you get prestige points."
The Public Relations Challenge
"The Comedian" – in trademark Serling fashion – did a masterful job of addressing the challenges of social currency and call out culture on social media without actually relying on social media as a direct narrative device. Rather, Peele's updated series forces the audiences to address the deep sociology underneath call out culture.
As public relations professionals, the way that we address call out culture can have a massive impact on its evolution as a broader social paradigm.
In a 2017 Sprout Social study on the issue's branding implications, "65 percent of people said that when they see someone else call out a brand on social, they’ll think twice about buying from them again but they want to do their own research first." Furthermore, 37 percent of respondents said that they'd be encouraged to buy from a brand that responded "well" to their social media call outs.
In other words, call out culture provides a cheap trick for marketers, social media managers and public relations professions. Just embrace it! The costs and benefits to your bottom line are both obvious and significant.
However, I think it's imperative that public relations professionals take ethical leadership to challenge call out culture, despite the perceived short-term costs of such a strategy. In a public relations industry that will be totally reshaped by the likes of artificial intelligence, agency consolidation and content marketing trends, it remains my belief that this toxic climate in the public will be the most pressing human challenge that P.R. professionals will face over the coming years.
Through a critique of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf argues that call out culture naturally begins "as a nuanced look at a complex matter, only to devolve into finger-pointing."
The burgeoning prestige-oriented call out culture that Haidt fears is so threatening to the public relations profession because it feasts on social media engagement and undermines the mature, rational system of free speech and self-advocacy that has allowed P.R. to become so robust in open Western society. While Sprout Social tells us that we can cash in on call out culture – for now – it's my own belief that these will be diminishing returns as a climate of free speech becomes increasingly turbulent for brands and public relations efforts. By playing into the call out culture game, brands risk reinforcing a trend where their rights to free speech and self-advocacy are diminished by a mob of finger pointers.
In the end, the least I can do is my part as an aspiring P.R. practitioner. That means being cognizant of call out culture and respecting the consequence of my profession through power of public relations in guiding society's interaction with free speech and self-advocacy.
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