CHAPTER FIVE

BALANCED DIET

The Organism Must Be Fed Healthy Content

 

DAVID BOWIE’S death in January 2016 left people in Michael’s and my cohort in a state of angst. Tributes to the brilliant musician–actor–performance artist poured in over Facebook as Generation Xers reminisced about Bowie—and what he represented in terms of their own youth. We, old friends and online strangers alike, engaged in a global ritual of nostalgic embrace and shared heartache. Bowie may not have achieved the same dominant influence as the Beatles, but in some ways his death was to our generation what John Lennon’s was to Baby Boomers. There was a “The Day the Music Died” feel to it all.

It wasn’t until he’d gone that we could understand Bowie’s true genius. In the final act of a life filled with character shifts, multiple personas, and mercurial plot lines, Bowie showed us in death why he mattered in life: He had, almost singlehandedly, taken the postmodern notion of a fluid, category-defying identity and made it mainstream. For tens of millions of young men and women who struggled to fit into a world that wanted to pigeonhole them according to their gender, sexuality, color, and other rigid definitions, Bowie showed that it was okay to be different, that it could in fact be cool to be weird. For me, a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality within the rigid confines of American Southern society, that was a powerful message. For his embrace of music, sexuality, and expression, I now see Bowie as a “mutant.” He added reams of new DNA to our culture, reshaping our preconceived ideas of who we were. He redrew the boundaries of our immunity, expanding our freedom of imagination.

Bowie’s message was not only liberating, it was prescient. His life, with its multiple personas from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke to Aladdin Sane, and with his deliberately ambiguous sexuality—he variously described himself as gay, bisexual, and a “closet heterosexual”—was a bellwether to our new, social media–fueled existence. The anonymity of the Internet—where, as New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner put it, “nobody knows you’re a dog”—has given a powerful new outlet to what anthropologists call “performativity,” the idea that we are constantly performing different versions of our “self” depending on the social context. Social media had brought out the inner Bowie in all of us.

Given that we are developing a biological analogy for our new social media–driven communication system, it’s appropriate that the most common metaphor applied to Bowie’s ever-changing persona comes from the natural world. He is frequently referred to as a chameleon, which, not coincidentally, was the title of an Australia-only Bowie compilation album from 1979, a treasured item in Michael’s early vinyl collection. Chameleons, of course, are the most fabulously versatile of animals, able to change their coloration at the drop of a hat. With four differently pigmented layers of skin, they can shift from bright green to dull brown to vibrant, multicolored patterns of the rainbow. Sometimes they change colors for camouflage, opting for a hue that blends into their environment; at other times the color expresses the chameleon’s mood or its eagerness to mate. It’s as if the chameleon is playing out different versions of its self depending on the “social” context in which it finds itself—whether it’s seeking to ward off competitors, attract a mate, or discourage a competing chameleon from going after whatever scarce resource it needs.

Chameleons are merely one particularly striking example of mimesis, a form of behavior that’s found across the animal and plant world. (Mimesis, which describes the act of mimicry, derives from the same Greek root as “mimeme,” from which Richard Dawkins came up with “meme.”) Mimicry is a fundamental aspect of life. Cuttlefish—sometimes called the “chameleons of the sea”—will change not only their color but also the pattern, texture, and shape of their skin to communicate with other cuttlefish, camouflage themselves, or scare off predators. Cats mimic the impression of a larger, more threatening attacker when they haunch their back to ward off unwanted challengers. Peacocks’ fluff up their hind feathers to give the impression of majesty when they seek a mate. Toads in Central American jungles make themselves look like leaves on the forest floor to hide from predators. Mexican milk snakes are harmless, but by mimicking the red, black, and white rings that mark the deadly Texas coral snake they scare off would-be predators. To avoid being ripped out by a farmer, various species of weed have evolved to look like the crops within which they mingle, including Echinochloa oryzoides, a species of grass that looks like rice (Oryza sativa). (In fact, rye was initially an unwanted impostor of wheat.)

Mimesis is the art of deception. It relies on the same tricks that illusionists use to deceive their audiences: by preying on the fact that the visual, auditory, and olfactory abilities of any organism are limited. We living things have a pre-programmed capacity for pattern recognition, which means our senses will struggle to perceive anything that falls outside of it. We are constantly looking for a certain order, seeking to recognize consistent, predictable patterns; that way we can make sense of the signals in our environment and respond accordingly. But we tend not to see—or smell, or hear, or feel, or taste—differently ordered patterns. Our narrowly proscribed perceptive ability is derived from both genetically inherited traits and, for more sophisticated organisms such as humans, from an ongoing learning process. Accordingly, our brains can be easily fooled by alternative, but no less true, versions of reality when the sensory signals fall outside those patterns. Essentially, mimesis is pattern mimicry. It confuses the readout that our internal computers conduct in surveying their surroundings.

Another way to think about these acts of mimicry in the natural world is as “stories.” They represent a particular version of reality, by no means a false one, that’s told—or, better put, performed—by one organism about the state of the world to influence the perception of other organisms. And it’s fair to say that no species has perfected this talent anywhere near as comprehensively as humans. As Yuval Harari points out in Sapiens, his sweeping explanation of the roots of civilization, the human arts of persuasion, storytelling, and myth creation were vital to the development of social organization and thus to our dominance of the planet. With our unique cognitive powers, we have taken the art of representation and description to a new level and have changed the world in the process. We’ve created societies in which millions of complete strangers convince themselves to join together to go off to fight and kill millions of other strangers. They do so because of a narrative that appeals to the “common values” they supposedly share as a result of their membership of an ambiguously defined idea called a “nation.” Religions, nationalisms, political allegiances, even schoolyard friends and enemies are formed around the stories we tell each other.

There’s something innately human about needing stories. Without them, could we even imagine life has a purpose? In a popular NPR Radiolab episode, Tom French, who read Harry Potter books to his very prematurely born daughter while she clung to life in an incubator, observed that her vital signs would pick up when he read to her. He took it as her sign that they should keep the machine on, that she wanted to keep up the struggle for life regardless of the risk that she might end up living a highly institutionalized life. Whether there’s a scientific explanation for her body’s response to hearing the passages, or whether it was just coincidence, the important thing was that it conveyed to this father who craved to “do something” an essential insight into who we are. “She didn’t know what a chapter is, but she was in her own way very eagerly waiting for the next chapter. And I don’t know a better way to describe wanting to be alive than that you want to find out what happens next,” French told his interviewers. Juniper is now a healthy, rambunctious toddler.

The rise of the Internet and in particular social media has dramatically changed the context in which this storytelling takes place, mostly by massively widening the audience for it. As publishers of information over social media we are all engaged, often subconsciously, in acts of mimesis, mimicking and expropriating others’ behavior and images to create new ideas, concepts, and memes that we want, in some way, to reflect back on us. We social media users, especially the younger ones among us, will frequently shift between different avatars and online monikers; we’ll create a variety of Twitter and Tumblr accounts, sometimes role-playing alternative characters and doing so in ways that can blur the lines between our “real” and “fake” online identities.

With an ever-present audience listening to us, we experience feedback that reflexively triggers ever more of these “stories.” I like to think of this new fabric of storytelling as a “cultural agar,” a “flat” place connected without time and distance in which new ideas bloom. (Agar is the concoction that scientists put into a petri dish to cultivate bacteria.) Office water coolers were once the proverbial place where employees came together to swap their stories from the day or night before. Now we have millions of virtual water coolers that come together to transcend location.

This global explosion of mimesis can be confusing, revealing the limits of our pattern recognition skills for understanding the world. Social media frequently demonstrates that what we think is an indisputable comprehension of reality is actually dependent on subjectivities formed by the patterns of our shared experiences. When that happens, we are fascinated by how our eyes and minds seem to play tricks on us. Witness the obsession with #TheDress, when millions worldwide debated whether a posted photo showed a dress that was white and gold or blue and black, or with #Findthesheep, in which it was impossible to see five hundred sheep in a photograph until the camera zoomed in on them.

More important than these quirky examples of the eye failing to “see,” the Social Organism’s memetic process of cultural change is also challenging the long-established patterns with which we understand markers of social order. The gender, sexuality, and racial identifiers through which we have traditionally classified people were always nothing more than social constructs, albeit powerful and long-standing ones. Individuals have always existed who felt that they belonged outside those categories, but society—like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave—could not see them for what they were. Their unique forms of self-identification lay outside those that society had constructed and, as such, lacked social legitimacy. But now social media has made it easier for such people to form groups of solidarity.

As the father of middle- and high-school-age kids, Michael is noticing that so many more LGBTQ teenagers from their generation are coming to terms with their sexuality at an earlier age than those of previous generations. In part, that’s because of the support they find in online communities that transcend their immediate neighborhood. These social media friendships give them confidence to be who they truly are. I can only imagine how my life, growing up as a closeted gay boy in Mississippi, would have been different if I’d had the same tools. My mom would put me in corduroy pants, never jeans, to go to school, and that simple feature of my dress made me a schoolyard pariah. Non-conformity was viewed as devilish and queer, something with which to feed the circus show of freaks that Katherine Dunn so wonderfully allegorized in her novel Geek Love, a story set in a context where “specialness” defined your value to the crew. We grow up with the imposition of our environments. But now the connectedness of the social Internet allows us to build tribes around value affinities instead of geo-locations.

One way to think about all this is that we are developing the social equivalent of biodiversity. Nature doesn’t care whether the tiny pink fairy armadillo of South America looks almost nothing like its more common cousin, the nine-banded, or long-nosed, armadillo found in the United States. It seems to be part mouse, part mole, and—only thanks solely to the rippled, armor-like dorsal shell on its back—part armadillo. Nothing prevents it from burrowing, feeding, and mating with other pink fairy armadillos. The platypus is a furry mammal, but it lays eggs, swims, and has a duck’s bill. It does just fine despite its defiance of classification. At its most broad and heterogeneous level, the Social Organism treats people with the same level of indifferent acceptance and creates room for them. It’s not a moral consideration; it’s a function of its organic, holonic architecture. That architecture is founded upon the subjective relationships between each member’s stories, not on an “objective,” pre-classified order to which all must conform.

The Social Organism might contain many divisions—which we’ll discuss in the next chapter—but within it there are opportunities for inclusion that never existed before.

Within this open space of possibilities, and amid the massive, chaotic, global interchange of images and text, people are exploring different identities and personas, just as the trailblazing David Bowie did. Simultaneously with this growing experimentation in self-expression, we are discovering that the rules with which we identify others are no longer as clear as we thought they were. The very process by which we define who we are is changing. That can be very disorienting. To make sense of it, we’re going to need to understand something that Shakespeare recognized centuries ago: All the world’s a stage.

Performativity theory, which dates back to the writings of the sociologist Erving Goffman in the fifties, holds that human communication via speech, images, gestures, and other tools is not merely carried out to convey information but also to construct notions of selfhood, as if we are performing different roles. Goffman argued that we adjust these performances—and thus the various “selves” we present to the world—according to different “frameworks,” or contexts, defined by the audience, the circumstance, and the ways in which our words and actions might be construed. The idea is that the self we perform when we are out drinking with our old school friends is different from that which we perform in the bedroom or that we present in a résumé for a prospective employer. In the nineties, the philosopher Judith Butler gave the theory a provocative turn when she argued that gender is not some prima facie fact of material sexual difference but a function of the roles that boys, girls, men, and women perform for the world at large, all in response to constructed social contexts.

Now, in the age of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, these ideas are drawing attention all over again. The fact that these social media platforms offer a giant global stage whose audience composition is unpredictable creates an entirely different framework and encourages a new type of performance. The feedback from the audience isn’t always constructive—I think one reason Justin Bieber has sometimes acted with recklessness and impunity is because his tweets and Instagram posts get immediate “likes.” His fans enable him. Other times the feedback is a brutal check on our behavior, as victims of the overreaching efforts of social media’s “morals police” can attest. Yet because mimesis and self-performance is biologically ingrained in our makeup, we just keep on doing it—listening as we go to the Organism’s signals.

The most blatant performative act in the social media realm is arguably the selfie. Whatever one thinks of this self-infatuation phenomenon, its ubiquity speaks to an innate human desire to present an appealing face to the world. Much as Facebook’s and Twitter’s creation of the “share” and “retweet” buttons were a response to their users’ ingrained desire to spread content, an industry of tools has evolved to feed what seems to be a market demand for this unique form of self-performance. In the pre-smartphone days of 2003, Sony Ericsson figured out that people would want a front-facing camera to take shots of themselves, in addition to an outward-facing camera to take photos of others, and so installed one in its Z1010 mobile phone. Soon, selfies were an obsession—in the immortal words of Paris Hilton, the camera phone became “the autograph of the twenty-first century.” Since then, the tools of the trade have become even more sophisticated, allowing people to touch up their photos and present their most preferred image. And with the spectacularly successful selfie stick—known to more cynical types as the Wand of Narcissus or the Narcisstick—people can take the performance to a new level by capturing their surroundings. Look at me. Here I am at Times Square. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. Here I am at a Beyoncé concert. The selfie has become a restrained art form, one that falls within the rules of a certain genre, a memetic code that we all instantly recognize.

We can’t all be like Kim Kardashian and turn our selfies into a money-spinning brand. But that’s not stopping many teens from striving to attain the Kardashian-like “it” factor that their favorite social media stars seem to have. The currency of uniqueness—or at least the appearance, or performance of uniqueness—is now extremely valuable for acquiring like-minded followers. The starting point for all of that is getting the right “face” out there.

All of us, in some way, are Kardashianists. (I’ve been dying to use that word.) Think of how much time many of us spend selecting our social media profile images. Clearly, my own choices for my various offbeat publicity photos (one with tongue out; one that looks upward into an agape mouth and nostrils that I call the “O-face”; one in which I’m flippin’ the bird, etc.) are a form of performance. But so, too, are Michael’s, if a touch more restrained: his daughter’s anime sketch of his face for Twitter; the pic with requisite quasi-intellectual expression for speaking engagements; the front profile half-torso photo with a sufficiently welcoming smile for LinkedIn and other “professional” situations. Our profile image is an integral part of the modern-day performance of selfhood.

The selfie and profile pic are merely two of the most obvious ways in which we perform on social media. Every word we utter in a Facebook post, every Tweet we make to score a political point, every time we choose to repost something witty or make a pertinent comment on someone else’s post, every photo of our holidays, family portraits, or pets that we offer to the world—all of it is performance. And we are performing not just one, but multiple personas. The digital era has turned all of us into chameleons.

As ardently as we go about this process of identity formation and reformation, total control of our online personas will inevitably elude us. While we might present images and impressions that we want the world to associate with us, the world will come up with its own interpretations. The lesson learned from people who’ve seen their image turned into an Internet meme—Ermahgerd!—is that, ultimately, we may have little choice but to embrace the process and accept what the social media world projects back onto us.

After Laney Griner’s 2007 photo of her fist-clenched baby son, Sammy, started getting replicated on MySpace, Reddit, and numerous other platforms as the widely shared—and, frankly, hilarious—“Success Kid” meme, her first response was dismay. “This picture has been stolen over and over. It makes me very unhappy, as this is my baby boy,” she lamented in the comments thread to the original Flickr post. But further down the same thread four years later, she wrote, “Thanks everyone! I’m happy about this little internet celebrity. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I love that so many people know this photo and like it. He’s an awesome little boy.” Another three years later, she used her “little internet celebrity” to raise $100,000 for her husband’s kidney transplant in an online crowdfunding campaign, declaring that “Justin ‘Success Dad’ Griner got his long awaited kidney transplant just one week ago. Such wonderful, life changing news for the Griners. Thank you all for your support. #successkidney.”

The appropriation of Leon Mitchell II’s image for the “Meth Curry” meme in late 2015 was more problematic. The joke, which paired NBA star Steph Curry’s face with that of Mitchell’s significantly more gaunt likeness to suggest that he would be Curry’s doppelganger if the basketball player were a methamphetamine addict, fostered mirth across Twitter and Instagram. But a week later, an Instagram post from Mitchell wiped the smile from everyone’s faces. After explaining that his appearance was the result of years of cancer treatment, he ended the post by saying, “If we are going to allow something like this to go viral, let’s do it for the right reasons! I am more than a meme, I am a father, husband, survivor, mentor, community advocate, and Positive motivational speaker. Proud to have endured and conquered everything I have!!!!” Within a week, his post had 90,000 “likes” and almost 7,500 comments filled with words of encouragement and admiration. Mitchell’s Instagram account leaped to 20,000 followers. Social media users who had shared the original meme contacted him to apologize. The publicity was a boon for his K.N.O.E. Clothing line, whose name stands for “Knot Now or Ever,” a play on the phrase that he and his wife used when he was battling cancer. Whether Mitchell’s case gets many social media users to think twice before leaping to conclusions remains to be seen. But it’s hard not to conclude that the episode ended on a higher note for humanity than where it started.

These examples remind us that in the dynamic world of social media the ever-changing definition of the “self”—a “story” attached to our persona—is a two-way street. Partly it’s constructed out of the singular performance we alone present to the world, but it’s equally dependent on what the community pushes back in response to that. Audience feedback helps propagate new ideas. It also dictates the algorithmic system with which Google ranks pages in search results, an extremely powerful determinant of status in the online world.

This two-way process is a kind of negotiation. Or, to stick with the thespian metaphor, it’s as if the consumers of our content aren’t so much the audience but fellow cast members in the performance of “me.” We are the protagonists; they can either be sympathetic minor characters in the play, or full-blown antagonists. Either way, our interactions with them are what round out the story; they make the impression complete.

One person who has demonstrated complete mastery of this interaction with the audience/fellow cast members is Banksy, the mysterious, unidentified graffiti artist whose provocative work has captured the public imagination like no other practitioner of this renegade art. Not only is Banksy a shape-shifting icon of this social media era, he has adeptly used the technology to accentuate the performance of his craft. In a one-month New York “residency” in October 2013, the artist managed to surreptitiously produce a provocative new mural in a different part of the city on each of thirty consecutive days. Just as important, every morning after his illegal artwork had been completed overnight he (who is widely assumed to be male) would post an image of the work on a website, complete with an audio recording describing the work’s relevance as social commentary, all done by mimicking the voice of a museum guide. The hunt for each new Banksy became an obsession for many New Yorkers. Once it was found, word would go out on social media and a horde would descend on the site, their smartphone cameras filming the chaos that ensued and massively amplifying the experience to the wider world. We might not know what the artist looks like or the name he was given at birth, but he has figured out how to use the giant audience of social media to perform the persona known as “Banksy” and in so doing turn it into a larger-than-life artist-hero.

Very few people have Banksy’s ability to mold the views of the social media crowd so completely to their needs. (Based on his effective use of the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account during the 2016 electoral campaign, Donald Trump seems to also share such talents.) The rest of us should be wary. While we can and should take care in how we express our identity in the public domain, we can’t control the fact that the Social Organism will do its own work constructing (or reconstructing) its interpretation of our identity. We have no choice but to work with it, rather than against it.

This isn’t easy, or fair. Some people have been truly hurt by the arbitrary and overpowering way in which social media pitchfork mobs can engage in mass character assassination against targeted individuals, responding to flimsily established evidence of antisocial behavior that’s often based on information taken out of context. In coming chapters, we’ll discuss how we might as a society manage the mob-like tendencies in social media. For now, it’s simply worth remembering one maxim: Engage positively with social media, not negatively, for the latter will only fuel kneejerk, countervailing responses, which can escalate into full-blown ill will.

To my celebrity clients, I’ve always said: “Don’t feed the trolls.” If you ignore those whose comments and tweets seem designed solely to provoke anger, thus starving them of the attention they crave, they will cease their infuriating behavior. (I always say a troll is like a quantum particle: It only exists when you acknowledge it through observation.) This lesson was very painfully learned in the summer of 2016 by the comedian Leslie Jones when an online argument with the misogynist “alt-right” leader Milo Yiannopoulos—an openly gay right-wing media commentator—stirred a mob of his fans to deliver a barrage of racist, sexist abuse on her. In engaging with her attackers, Jones fed them into a frenzy. Twitter only made it worse when it shut off Yiannopoulos’s account, turning him into a martyr and spurring his fans to start a #FreeMilo movement. Some of these low-lifes went so far as to hijack a proxy for Jones’s Twitter account to make it seem as if she herself was putting out homophobic, bigoted commentary. When her publicist called on me for advice, I responded with my standard line about simply ignoring, about not feeding the trolls. Jones took a two-day break from Twitter and then came back with the perfect response, tweeting out this quote from an anonymous social media philosopher: “Don’t try to explain yourself to idiots. You’re not the fuckface whisperer.”

We can also use this food metaphor for the opposite lesson: that if you want to create an appealing persona and a positive impression among certain people or target markets, then the content you feed them should convey that positivity. As per Life Rule number two: the Social Organism needs to be fed. Like all living things, in order to grow—to create new nodes and cells—the organism’s metabolism takes in sources of energy, processes it, and then purges itself of waste. For this to work optimally, it needs to be fed a healthy diet of content. The more it is fed, the more it grows.

Much as Laney Griner learned that she was better off feeding the Social Organism what it wanted with the “Success Kid” persona that meme jokesters had imposed on her baby son, I’ve learned from working with companies that a similar, nourishing approach is the best way to develop their own effective identity—or brand—on social media. I first learned this at my video content start-up Revver, where we discovered and monetized the famous “Diet Coke + Mentos” video for the crazy “scientists” at Eepy Bird. (If you’re not familiar, do yourself a favor and go YouTube it now.) Their now legendary choreographed display of exploding Diet Coke geysers infused with Mentos mints has been seen at least 50 million times across various platforms. Mentos immediately saw the value of associating with a viral hit and sponsored some of the versions. In other words, it chose to feed the Organism. And in a rapid affirmation of that decision, the company’s iconic brand of mints started reappearing at checkout counters shortly afterward. By contrast, Coca-Cola first distanced itself, reckoning that it was an unauthorized message, inconsistent with their in-house brand definition. “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it,” a company spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. “The craziness with Mentos...doesn’t fit with the brand personality of Diet Coke.” Coke’s stance denied the soft-drink maker an opportunity to convert the fun, widely inclusive conversation into a stronger brand awareness strategy. In fact, I was later vindicated when Coke, seeing that the phenomenon had raised Diet Coke sales in North America over 5 percent, changed its tune. The company has since worked with the Eepy Bird duo on various Diet Coke and Zero Coke “experiments.”

In the ten years since the first Diet Coke and Mentos performances, countless brands have learned a lesson on the importance of engaging, rather than opposing, the social media feeding frenzy. Even a stodgy, conservative brand like Red Lobster knew that it had to do something constructive, however meek, after Beyoncé’s bombshell “Formation” release included a racy shout-out to the restaurant chain, “When he fuck me good, I take his ass to Red Lobster.” Eight hours after the song’s release had social media in stitches about it, Red Lobster came back with its own tweet, in which it substituted the singer’s nickname for the middle word in its trademarked Cheddar Bay Biscuits: “‘Cheddar Bey Biscuits’ has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? #Formation @Beyonce.” It wasn’t exactly a zinger, and the long delay suggests that the marketing team agonized over how to respond to this unsolicited, explicit association with their brand. But in the end, it was the right response: Don’t resist, roll with it. By staying out of the way, the collective genius and wit of social media delivered Red Lobster the best boost to its brand awareness that it has had in decades. Noting that its name had received 42,000 mentions on Twitter in just one hour, Red Lobster announced that sales on the weekend of the song release were up 33 percent from where they were a year earlier.

Even if traditionally structured companies now understand that they must work with social media, not against it, and are trying not to be overly controlling of what they think their brand’s identity should be, vested interests inside these organizations can keep working against this organic process. There’s still a prevailing mind-set, just like that of the broadcast news presenters, that their version of a story is the only one that can be presented. Sometimes it’s the marketing guys refusing to feed the Social Organism. (As I like to say, passersby have no way to directly respond to billboards on Sunset Boulevard, which is why marketing teams keep using them: They’re insulated from negative feedback.) Other times, the ones who are starving the Organism are the lawyers. In taking legal action, supposedly in the protection of proprietary interests, they’re capable of totally cutting off the metabolic pathways of the Organism and breaking its flow dynamics. This speaks to the full aspect of rule two: To function well a living thing must take in food, transport that converted energy around the Organism, and trigger the chemical reactions needed for it to grow and regulate the body. In other words, the memetic process of content replication and mimicry needs to be left unimpeded. Censorship—which is what excessive trademark or copyright control ends up being—is like a blocked artery that’s preventing oxygen and nutrients from circulating around a body. That means that for the Social Organism, proprietorial lawyers are like saturated fats. Their actions lead to the accumulation of bad cholesterol and impede healthy blood flow.

At theAudience we deliberately eschewed strict corporate controls over proprietary material, which meant we could move quickly as we avoided the lengthy approval processes that can impede a message from spreading. But even then, we’d still often run into corporate lawyers who couldn’t help themselves. Case in point: We developed and released the hit song and video #Selfie by the Chainsmokers, tapping forty-six influencers to launch it into the network and exploit their armies of followers. The strategy was resoundingly successful, in large part because of the memetic mutations that we’d actively encouraged. We had learned from the accidental success of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and used all the tricks of replication that we’d observed in that free-content explosion. We preloaded the music-posting site SoundCloud with six-second, fifteen-second, and thirty-one-second #Selfie “drops” so that people would use these seeds to make their own songs. We actively seeded the phenomenon, we put forth examples, and we used the power of influencers as distribution. The result: lots of riffs on the core refrain of “but first, lemme take a selfie,” including edgy plays such as “but first, lemme drink a protein” or “but first, let me take a dick pic.” For the core song, these riffs were a huge boost, helping make it go platinum in ten countries. But then, suddenly, it ended. The band sold the song to Universal, which immediately took on the draconian policy of shutting off all YouTube derivative works on mobile—and limiting video playback to only fourteen countries on VEVO. Immediately, the momentum stopped. The song’s new owner had curtailed the Organism’s memetic replication, in essence starving it to death.

As we’ve discussed, it takes more than simply pushing a message out to a broad number of influencers to make it grow. To harness the Social Organism’s global distribution system for maximum impact, the message must possess the right content, too. We know from history that artworks that become powerful memes are those that tap into deep-seated emotions: the uplifting celebration in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”; the rousing “I have a dream” speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.; the patriotic stirrings that Americans found in the Iwo Jima flag-raising image; or the resolute determination that Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara inspired in generations of would-be revolutionaries. Now in the social media era, the ability to stir up emotion is as important as ever to the success of any piece of content.

Remember the Wharton business school study of the differing impact that a variety of emotional triggers would have on people’s propensity to share news stories on social media? It showed that our responses to a piece of online content will fluctuate depending on the type of emotion that it elicits. The researchers showed that the response was determined first by a binary question of the feeling generated—whether it was emotionally positive or negative—and second by a more nuanced matter of whether the particular emotion elicited was more or less likely to motivate action. But there’s a third way to break this down: What kind of a response do we want to generate? Just because an image or a piece of text is shared doesn’t mean the memetic replication will automatically confirm to the positive image, persona, or brand management we intend to cultivate. We might think we’re “performing” certain desirable versions of ourselves, but there’s no guarantee the audience will see it that way. Their responses to our performance, the choices they make in how to portray it, can do as much to determine the public persona that emerges out of this interaction as we can. A social media audience in this sense also composed of cast members engaged in the performance of “you.”

Let’s return to the biological analogy. If we examine different types of emotion-inducing content as a biologist might study the impact of consuming different sources of nutrition, we can think of the various types of published messages as food types. Each will have unique, distinct effects on the Social Organism’s well-being. What the Organism’s metabolism needs, I like to say, is a balanced diet. So while a message with an angry tone, with its capacity for adrenaline release, might be an especially strong motivator for someone to hit the retweet button, it’s not a healthy source of sustenance over the long term. It breeds negativity on a wider scale, which as the Wharton study suggests, would, over the longer term, tend toward the contradictory impact of lessening people’s desire to share content. Much like Big Macs, anger releases endorphins that give a transitory sense of satisfaction. But most of us know we should limit our consumption of cheeseburgers.

The kind of content that best succeeds within the social media architecture is not based in fear, sadness, or fury. What works is optimal, positive emotional resonance. At theAudience, we made it our business to figure out what that was. Before we decided on what content we would release to our network of influencers and nodes, we had to decide on the just-right emotional tone. The content varied tremendously, and the mood for each message contained plenty of nuances. But we always, always went for positivity. We asked ourselves, does the piece of content seek to inspire? Does it uplift? Amuse? It had to pass a positive emotion litmus test.

To trigger these optimal emotional responses, the food also needs to be properly packaged. Specifically, content needs to be delivered in a nonlinear object-based narrative form, a lesson that—despite its basis in millennia of human communication and storytelling—seems to be lost among the senior marketing managers of our world. Traditionally, stories have followed formulas. Remember pattern recognition, the memetic coding structure with which the receptors in our brains engage with incoming information? If the narrative follows a pattern that’s familiar, the recipient’s brain can process it. In that way content pierces the defenses of the host and begins to replicate itself. It becomes a meme.

I like to give clients a piece of advice I learned from John Lasseter at Pixar: To write a successful story that conveys an intended message, you need a narrative that centers on a lovable character that keeps you on the edge of your seat but that also lives by a set of rules. But in the Social Organism even the best scripted narratives become a living, iterative story over which we do not have complete control. The script will change, depending on how it is received by the Organism.

Getting this right is as much art as science. Social media is still very much in its infancy. I use the example of breaking apart the story into photos, images, videos, and spreading them as ubiquitously as possible through multiple channels and then using hashtags and search engines to weave them back together in narrative threads. It’s hard to predict how content will be received and treated. Often what seems like a harmless, open-minded message can prompt an unexpectedly negative backlash. But this is an art that can be learned. The starting point for figuring out how not to inadvertently foster negativity around your brand must be an understanding that social media is a living, breathing organism. It is the antithesis of a static, one-way distribution mechanism; it’s a complicated, multiplayer dialogue over which content creators have limited control.

J.P. Morgan Chase’s social media strategists were given a hard lesson in this when they decided to use the hashtag #AskJPM to invite Twitter users to an online Q&A session with the soon-to-be-named new leader of the investment banking division. These poor, misguided banking flaks seemed to forget that Twitter was not like a confidential helpline for the firm’s customers. Twitter is a public forum in which participants will take your content and reinterpret and manipulate it in whatever way they choose for their own self-expression and identity performance. The other thing the mega-bank’s publicity mavens forgot was that it was November 2013, just five years on from the worst financial crisis in eighty years, a tragedy that left millions out of work and millions more stripped of their homes, and which was widely blamed on the greed and recklessness of senior bankers at firms like J.P. Morgan. In the two previous months, the bank had been forced to sign a $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department for peddling bad mortgage loans and was hit with a $920 million fine over a London trader who’d manipulated the derivatives market.

When the tweet went out with its #AskJPM invitation, it immediately elicited questions like these:

“Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?”

“What section of the poor & disenfranchised have you yet to exploit for profit, & how are you working to address that?”

“When [CEO] Jamie Dimon eats babies are they served rare? I understand anything above medium-rare is considered gauche.”

Hours later, with more than a thousand retweets on the clock, this tweet was posted by the @jpmorgan account: “Tomorrow’s Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board.” To this day, #AskJPM is used as shorthand both for bad social media PR decisions generally and by activists looking to attract anti-bank sentiment to their cause. It’s pretty much the epitome of a hashtag fail. Still, given the post-crisis context in which it operates, it’s hard to imagine how J.P. Morgan could have used social media to prompt any open questions from the public. If it had properly understood the beast it was dealing with, perhaps its publicists would have concluded that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place.

Most companies aren’t as hamstrung by negative public opinion as J.P. Morgan. And if they’re willing to relinquish some control, social media can be a resoundingly effective way to reach a mass audience and positively shape a brand. But once we recognize it as a living organism that needs nourishment, there are definite dos and don’ts when it comes to choosing what to feed it. Here’s one rule of thumb: Let the Social Organism think for itself.

I first learned these lessons after I was hired to take over Disney’s social media strategy. I was tasked with promoting the new Toy Story 3 movie in 2010. It had been eleven years since Toy Story 2. So the six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds who’d fallen in love with the toy characters Buzz Lightyear and Woody in the first two versions were now in high school and college. TV advertisers—focused, misguidedly as always, on women and young kids—were ignoring these Millennials, who in any case weren’t even watching TV because they’d discovered a unique new form of entertainment: Facebook. So when confronted with the challenge of connecting with these young adults, of trying to get them back for a third go-round, we decided that Facebook was the right medium. (We called them the Andy-ites—Andy of course being the central boy character who, like our target audience, goes off to college in Toy Story 3 and must decide what to do with his old toys.)

I went to the marketing team and they said, “Congratulations, here’s our new movie poster; go make it viral.” There were two problems: (1) the poster, which was simply a yellow number three against a black background, and (2) the copy that they insisted I use with it: “Hey kids, here’s the new Toy Story 3 poster. Isn’t it great?” Within five minutes of that being up on Facebook it had generated five hundred responses, most of them with varying uses of the word “fuck”: “No, it’s not fucking great; it’s a three on a fucking black background” or, the one that really hit home, “Fuck you, Disney, you ruined my childhood.” I went to the guy who made the poster and I asked him why he thought these kids hated it so much, and he replied, “Oliver, it’s not the poster that they hate, it’s your tone, because you were telling them, in the rhetorical voice, what to think.” So, we just put it up again with the straightforward statement of “Here’s the new Toy Story 3 poster.” The response was 100 percent positive. I’d never seen such a 180-degree turn in public opinion. On social media you can’t tell people what to think. Dogma invites negativity.

So that’s a cautionary tale on what not to do. But what about more constructive uses of emotional content? Well, a subsequent experience during the Toy Story 3 marketing effort would teach me that if we tapped the right emotional triggers on social media, we could reach an enormous audience and have far more influence than anything we could ever hope to achieve over traditional media outlets. A few months after the Facebook release of the first movie poster, I gained access to Pixar’s rich archive of artwork. The archivists found a wonderful image, a gouache painting from the original storyboards, of Buzz and Woody arm in arm. We posted that one on Facebook, too, with the caption, “You’ve got a friend in me”—a line from Randy Newman’s popular song of the same name, which was featured in the first and second movies. I was simply unprepared for the impact that it had. That post was shared a quarter of a million times, which because of the effects of friend networks on Facebook meant it appeared on about 200 million people’s newsfeeds.

When Toy Story 3 was released on June 12, 2010, it earned an astonishing $41 million at the box office before the day was over. It would go on to gross more than $1 billion, a figure that, until Frozen overtook it in 2014, set the record for the highest grossing animated film of all time. What drove all those people to the theater? Market research revealed something that the ad agencies had refused to believe: that a staggering 42 percent of those who attended the movie were motivated not by some expensively produced ads they’d seen on TV, or even by the word-of-mouth advice of their friends, but by Disney’s virtually costless direct postings on Facebook. This was a fundamental shift in movie marketing. And this had all happened because of the unique power of the “You’ve got a friend in me” meme to have an emotional influence on our target audience. With that one piece of social media magic, we helped turn Toy Story 3 into a bonanza. By unlocking a bundle of positive feelings—nostalgia, warmth, and the loyalty of true friends—we’d gotten these eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds to fall back in love with the story of Woody, Buzz, and Andy.

I took those lessons to theAudience, where I saw, again and again, how tapping feelings of love and warmth proved the most effective way to spread a message on social media. For example, in the social media research we undertook for a promotional campaign for the singer Usher, we tested the resonance of various images that might best characterize the pop icon’s public persona. Our options included instantly recognizable images of Usher as a sexy, shirtless performer, Usher the ladies’ man, and Usher the philanthropist, but the one that got by far the most likes and shares was Usher and his two beautiful children. “Daddy Swag,” as this image was later coined, connected intrinsically with the middle-aged mother of two into which his fan base had matured. The image of Usher as a doting father was viral gold.

One of my all-time favorite campaigns at theAudience was for the skin and hair care product maker Dove, which took a stand against the poisonous tactics that cosmetics companies use to make women feel anxious about their looks and scare them into buying their products. Dove made the “Real Beauty Sketches” video, which became the most watched online video advertisement ever. (At last count it was viewed 66.7 million times on YouTube.) In the video, a professional forensic artist sketches unseen women based on their own descriptions of their facial features. Later the artist draws the same women’s faces based on descriptions from other women whom they’d just met. The magic happens when the subjects of the drawing are shown the two versions and discover that the other women consistently describe them in more flattering terms than they described themselves. For the “Real Beauty Sketches” project, we generated over a thousand pieces of ancillary content in seventeen languages, each of which was tied to a unique moment in a woman’s life. It won numerous Golden Lion Awards at Cannes. Later we also worked on Dove’s follow-up “Beauty Patches” campaign, which showed the tearful, positive reactions of volunteer women after they were told that the supposedly scientific “RB-X patch” that they thought was making them feel better about their looks contained no active ingredients at all. It was a placebo effect, designed to show that beauty is a state of mind. Last count, the video hits for that one stood at 21 million.

I know what you’re thinking. If social media responds so well to life-affirming messages of love and warmth, then why is it filled with so much hate? How do we cope with this seeming contradiction? Well, just like the human body, the Social Organism has a functioning immune system to ward off such negative invaders and dangers. We need to keep it in good shape. That’s the topic of the next chapter.