She’s here, and on five social media platforms at the same time. Follow Evangelia on Instagram: @evangelullu

Superpositioning

Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once

In previous Collective Journey blog entries, we talked about how the old broadcast model of mass communication is giving way to a new kind of pervasive communication that in many ways harkens back to ancient storytelling practices. Thousands of years ago, it would have been difficult to tell at times who was the storyteller and who was the audience.

Story in many ancient cultures was messy, nonlinear, and often fully participative. Sitting around the fire, caught up in the fear and wonder of the tale, any tribe member could chime in with a piece of the story, or take off on a tangent. What you had to say counted. You were taken seriously.

Your words could well contribute to the direction of the narrative — or even the next steps to be taken by the community.

In the centuries since that time, newspapers, radio, television, and film have separated shamans from their tribes. A pit was placed between stage and seats. The story on the screen ran with no regard for the viewers in the seats. In the process, each of us, individual members of the community, would gradually lose power and influence.

By the 20th century, we had less to do with shaping our condition, our way of life, our reality, and more to do with leaning back and accepting the narrative that was fed to us.

But in the past decade, billions of human beings have gained the uncanny power to superposition themselves. We can now exist and express ourselves in multiple places at the same exact time. That changes everything.

The Space Between

In 1999, prescient rock star David Bowie told BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman that the rise of the internet placed us on a cusp that was “both exhilarating and terrifying.”

Bowie explained that the division between artist and audience was breaking down, and that the audience was becoming “at least as important” as the storyteller. He identified a new area of powerful engagement that sits between media content and the masses.

Bowie called it, the gray space in the middle.

What Bowie recognized was that digital communication was soon going to blow us back to the Stone Age.

To illustrate the remarkable action taking place in this Gray Space, all we need to do is look at three corporate blunders that took place in April, 2017: Pepsi’s disastrous Kendall Jenner commercial, the United Airlines passenger debacle, and Fox News being forced to fire Bill O’Reilly in the wake of sexual harassment claims. AgencySparks describes each of these events and how the companies dealt with them here.

These three public relations crises had two things in common. They all came to a head — a final decision point — with amazing speed. But more importantly, speed to resolution for all three was fueled not by the media, or politicians, or even advertisers (in the case of Fox News), but by ordinary people…millions of us.

In each case, as a mass audience, we did not simply watch the news and suck our teeth. We didn’t just complain about it to our friends and officemates. Instead, we entered cyberspace — diving headlong into that gray space in the middle — and kicked us some ass.

We passed along videos on Facebook and made snarky or impassioned comments.

We created memes comparing Kendall Jenner — deeply unfavorably — with Baton Rouge protestor Ieshia Evans and spread them across Instagram.

We groused bitterly about Fox News’ and United’s initially flat-footed excuses on Twitter.

We petitioned for advertisers to immediately vacate O’Reilly’s show.

In meatspace (the real world), we didn’t have to do much at all. But the still relatively novel platform of social media amplified our voices. And while some may dismiss this as “slacktivism” — a lazy activism without real teeth—it’s much more than that.

With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, we mocked and shamed three evergreen brands, and made some of the world’s most powerful CEOs dance like monkeys.

In a strange way, we’re back in the Stone Age. We can now be heard across the campfire, instantly and collectively, by even the loftiest of chieftains and their shamans.

Finding Ourselves in the Gray

In our last installment, we talked about the narrative “engine” at the heart of Collective Journey storytelling, particularly when it comes to how large numbers of people can suddenly become activated to the point where significant changes can occur.

We called the first component of that engine regenerative listening, a process where the storyteller listens so intently to the audience, that the audience’s language, attitudes, and concerns start to show up in the story itself. This excites the audience, building a bond of loyalty and support, that is in return supported by more story.

We see examples of regenerative listening in the ongoing relationship between J.K. Rowling and millions of Harry Potter fans. We see it in how Disney and Lucasfilm have been celebrating Star Wars fandom with conventions and by furnishing images and sound effects so that fans can create their own Star Wars films.

We saw it in the Trump campaign, as the previously socially liberal New Yorker began reflecting the issues, fears, and anger of disenfranchised Americans.

The second component of the Collective Journey engine is Superpositioning.

Like regenerative listening, we draw the term from science, where the superposition principle describes how various types of waves overlap. When the surface of a puddle is broken, for example, we can see ripples move outward in concentric circles.

For our purposes, superpositioning posits that we can drop ourselves into the digital realm, like a drop of water in a large pond, and send waves of communication to others. Only in this case, if those signals are potent, impassioned, or otherwise striking, they have the potential to draw other water droplets from the real world into the cyberspace pond.

Those droplets, in turn, send out their own similar ripples, some of which reach further across the pond. In certain cases, the effect of a single drop — a single communication — can reach an exponential number of people. A raindrop can become a thunderstorm.

Our Multiple Online Selves Are Real

In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffman posited that when you meet another person, you attempt to control or guide the impression that the other person will form of you, by altering your speech, appearance and mannerisms.

In short, whether we are conscious of it or not, we are theatrical. We play many roles in life. We are the caring parent to our children, the gossiping friend, the dutiful employee, the complaining customer — sometimes all in the same day.

But what we’re still only beginning to realize is that the number of roles we are playing on a daily basis has increased because of social media. In the case of teens and young adults, that number has nearly doubled.

If you’re a Millennial (under 40 years old) or Gen-Z (under 20), think about how you present yourself in digital space. On Facebook you might be leading a fun, successful life. On LinkedIn you’re the one with the mad skills. On Instagram you are the dreamy photographer. On Snapchat you’re the goofy friend. On Xbox Live, you’re a trash-talking champion of first-person shooters.

These distinctive personae are intentional, and they’re all part of you.

Since you use them for different purposes, the way you project yourself may be slightly (or a whole lot) different on each of these platforms. Like those ripples across the pond, your followers or the people you follow may overlap, but they might also be entirely distinct circles of people. If asked, members of each of these groups might describe you in different ways.

“It seems like I’m setting all pretense aside and being my real self in my Finsta [a secondary and more exclusive Instagram account kept by many teenagers],” my 14 year-old daughter Evangelia recently told me. “I do this because I trust my closest friends, and that’s who I let into my Finsta. “But, it’s really kind of a front. I’m actually thinking about what I’m posting and making sure it’s cool: it looks cool or sounds cool. It’s designed to be a bit more intense and uncensored. It’s like a VIP section. I have 80 people who want to get in, but not yet. Maybe never. It makes people feel special to be on my Finsta.”

While this principle holds, the past few years have made it abundantly clear that it no longer only applies to teens. Millions of adults are now forming multiple serious and fully realized personae across social media.

We all try to shape how we’re perceived in these different communities. We carefully consider what we post. We look for likes and hearts and smiley faces. We get annoyed if we get negative reactions. We think about how we’re doing on our feeds, even when we’re not on them. Even while we’re going about our lives in meatspace, we want to check.

Those roles we play on each of our social media, they are each slightly different projections of ourselves. But there’s a twist: in real life, when we finish playing our roles, we leave. We’re no longer in the room. Everyone moves on.

But in social media, we persist. We continue to be alive and present, right there on Facebook, 24-hours a day.

That’s superpositioning.

For many of us, those online personae, those ongoing simultaneous projections of ourselves, they’re very real. We are emotionally invested in them, because they are truly extensions of our identities.

This can be exhausting! This new reality adds new stresses, anxieties, and pleasures to our lives. But we’re also starting to learn that our superpositioned selves have the potential to make us enormously powerful.

It’s Not the Meme, It’s the Story

Much has been made about the transmission of memes, those usually funny images, videos or bits of text that we rapidly spread across social media. From LOLcats begging for cheezburgers to Willy Wonka flaring his eyes at some bit of hypocrisy, we pass them along for the laughs.

Sometimes we get a meme that moves some of us to get a bit creative and physical, as exemplified by the Ice Bucket Challenge, planking, or the Harlem Shake. But the end result of pretty much all of these is that they quickly fade into obscurity, like Japanese fads or American dance crazes, except much faster.

Where superpositioning takes on true force is when the meme is modified by the addition of personal perspective, endorsement, or plea.

So, this isn’t just an image or even some important article — this is you giving your friends a personal heads up. This is you leveraging your status in the community, their trust in you, so you can alert them to your message.

In this way, the message (the article, video, text or image) serves to confirm your strong belief in the forwarded issue. At the same time, the fact that you created or modified this content—and that it has been published, existing online forever—serves to validate your belief to yourself.

Rather than just the meme alone, it is your introductory story on top of the meme—your personal spin on the meme’s message, even if it’s just a few words (“This really sucks!” “Drop what you’re doing and read this.” “Crooked Hillary!”)—that riles up your followers.

Hundreds of these types of memes produced in Russia were seen by tens of thousands of people on Facebook. They were often accompanied by the endorsement of the poster, and fierce arguments in the comments.

Let’s flip the script: If you see a personalized post from your close friend, if it’s someone you respect, if it’s someone talented, even if it’s someone who’s only entertained you and made you laugh, you’re going to give that message a second look.

And if they’ve told their story well, you might even share it with your following, or take some other kind of action. The narrative is now starting to generate energy.

Turning a Raindrop into a Thunderstorm

The most important thing to understand about superpositioning is that sharing stories across two or more social media accounts can immensely amplify an idea.

If we belong to multiple overlapping and independent social media and online communities, and something happens to make us feel truly concerned or impassioned, we might transmit that story to one, a few, or all of those communities.

This instantly increases the number of “impressions” a post receives, and at stunning velocity this action multiplies our audience.

Strong feelings are easy to convey through the Gray Space, and when we receive them, they give us a little emotional spike. How many people can you reach, if you really felt moved to tell something to all of your followers or contacts? What percentage of them might be moved to pass on your message? And what percentage of the ones who receive that message might pass it on to their own following?

So instead of a single ring radiating out of a solitary drop of water, we are getting multiple rings. A better analogy in this case would be instead of drops and circles, we are getting fractals.

Fractals are complex, dynamic shapes that grow and branch off smaller versions of themselves, that in turn grow and branch off smaller versions of themselves, and so on.

Saplings grow into trees in fractals, water vapor crystalizes into snowflakes in fractals, and lightning cracks across the sky in fractals.

What happens with ideas that are driven by strong enough stories is that they don’t fade. Instead, they gain momentum across your social media, blossoming out like high-speed fractals.

Fractal expansion.

When story spreads this way, it surrounds us, immerses us, comes back to us in the voices of our family, friends, and colleagues, the people we admire. The story becomes ubiquitous. The ideas in those stories are reinforced.

Those overnight public relations disasters we talked about? This is how they happened.

Superpositioning Births Movements

My company Starlight Runner has been tracking scenarios where the massive spread of story was designed to do so intentionally. This is a new technique, where superpositioning is successfully harnessed to activate huge numbers of people.

Black Lives Matter, Make America Great Again, Me Too, ISIS, the Arab Spring—all of these were initiated through the use of a combination of regenerative listening and the exponential spread of story via superpositioning.

We aren’t just talking about socio-political movements, of course. Apple, Amazon, Costco, and Salesforce all engage in potent dialogs, highly interactive experiences, and focused customer service. This promotes the spread of positive discussion and fan-like responses to their brands, helping to make each a world leader. We superposition our engagement with them.

As the Collective Journey series progresses, we’ll deconstruct some of these as case studies, but the critical question right now—particularly if you’re in the business of conveying story—is, what do you want to have happen in the gray space in the middle?

What is rapidly becoming clear, is that if you’re not taking superpositioning into account, you will fail at 21st century storytelling. Just ask United, Pepsi, Fox News, and the Clinton campaign in 2016.

Next: Once story reaches critical mass, motivating huge numbers of people to take action, the third component of the Collective Journey narrative engine kicks in: Social Self-Organization.

Special thanks to Maya Zuckerman for her contributions to my thinking on Superpositioning. And thanks to Alan Berkson, Jordan Greenhall, and Chrysoula Artemis for their valued editorial input.

The Collective Journey Series:

Intro: Why is This Happening?

A New Narrative Model Explains it

Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us

Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age

Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It

The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling

Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television

Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey

Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer

In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field

Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses

The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives

Part 6: Regenerative Listening

Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement

Part 7: Superpositioning

Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once

Part 8: Social Self-Organization

Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real