So, is every Google search already in the past?
A few years ago, I was excitedly running from one client to another, claiming: “In the future, there will be no media, only content.”
At a 4A’s conference a year later, I took the lyrics to Elvis’s “A Heartbreak Hotel” and compared it to the Eagle’s lyrics “Hotel California.”
The idea was to show how language and metaphor change, how they affect the status of meaning. How we in the advertising business use language and visual symbols that have long ago fallen out of context. Half the time we don’t know what we’re talking about and the other half is lost on the people we’re talking to.
Yes, now we can text, send emails, download music, Google, play games, bid on eBay, blog and share our opinions with others. We now have instantaneous access to other people but no more to ourselves.
This I believe gets to the heart of it. “Speed,” writes Milan Kundera, ‘is the form of ecstasy that the technical revolution has bestowed on man.” And in this age of quick information, the present is solidified into history as it happens. So if time is continually obsolete, then every Google search is already in the past.
Since time is in the past, we are traditionalizing from a society that once saw itself through a time and space perspective to one that is now overwhelmed by volume. This change deserves a name. I am waiting for McSweeny to come up with a better one but for the time being “Volumetric Age” will have to do–where volume overpowers substance and nothing makes sense anymore.
When you think about it, the concept of time and space helped to understand who we are and the world around us. It is the engine of our reality. But mass and volume are now the disturbances of our lives. Suddenly, everything is strange.
In fact, Tom Stoppard said the other day that so many things are going wrong that it is tough to decide what to write about.
What we are having is a crisis in meaning.
If we are having a crisis in meaning, we are also likely to be having a crisis in communications. As much as I believe in brand content, having developed a whole architecture on how to best create it, I believe there are other alternatives. Not better or worse. Just others.
As I continue working on the evolution of brands, it occurs to me we ought to consider the notion of separating brands from communications.
Is it possible?
Of course it is.
Today, there is no single answer - just a series of alternatives.