Friday, November 30, 2012

Mewing Nuns, Disappearing Dongs, and Socialmania

 
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles McKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)


It’s a human trait that whenever we start gathering in groups, we tend to act like idiots or believe in the absurd.  The behaviour of soccer fans or the success of Bernie Madoff stand as examples. 

Delusions usually start off when one person acts out of the ordinary.  OK, way out of the ordinary. For instance, during the Middle Ages at a convent in France, a nun began to mew like a cat.  And she mewed to two nuns, and they mewed to two nuns and so on and so on and so on… Pretty soon all the nuns were mewing.  And everyday they gathered at the same time and mewed for several hours together. Now, during the Middle Ages cats were considered to be BFFs of Satan and when the all the sisters in the nunnery started sounding like cats, the local citizenry sort of freaked out and called the cops.  These kitty koncerts continued until the fuzz arrived and told the nuns that soldiers were coming to block the entrance to the convent and would use their wooden rods to beat the tar out of any nun who mewed until they promised not to mew anymore.  This may be where the expression “cat got your tongue” originated because the mewing stopped shortly afterward.  (Heckler, J.F.C. Epidemics of the Middle Ages (1844):117 4n)


Then there is the case of the disappearing dongs.  In 1990, years before Nigerians figured out how to use the Internet to con gullible Westerners out of their money, the men of the country were losing their dongs.  It all started, apparently, when a man accidentally bumped into a stranger in public, and moments afterwards the victim supposedly had a strange feeling in his scrotum and had to grab his junk to make sure it was intact.  He believed it had disappeared.  This caused him to chase after the stranger and accuse him in public of being a genital thief, which, of course, would attract a crowd—who in their right mind wouldn’t want to see where that was going to end? 

The growing mob demanded proof that the pecker had been purloined and forced the victim to drop his pants.  Of course the victim, now standing half naked in the street, fell back on the Monty Python “She turned into a newt” defense. He claimed that while there was, indeed, a penis where his penis was supposed to be (he got better), it was, however, a lot smaller than before, or it was a “ghost” penis—really, what man wouldn't say that?  The poor accused would then be subsequently beaten until the penis was restored to it’s original size.  There were a few cases of some being beaten to death—the accused that is.   

 Whoomp! There It Isn't

The mania spread quickly and believers became so convinced that genital thieves lurked everywhere that the streets in Lagos looked like a Michael and Janet Jackson video because men clutched their crotches, or kept their hands in their pockets to maintain a good hold of their block and tackle.  Women even got into the act by gripping their mommy bags or crossing their arms over their chests whenever they were in public.  A lack of vigilance and weak willpower, it was believed, led to the stealing of the weenies.  (Ilechukwu, S.T.C. 1992. Magical penis loss in Nigeria: Report of a recent epidemic of a koro-like syndrome. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29:91-108.)

There are hundreds of other examples—single tulip bulbs worth a year’s salary, flying saucers (a purely 20th Century delusion), and the mid-'70s, early-'80s El Chupacabra, the rat faced, kangaroo-legged, blood-licking, sulphur emitting goatsucker of Puerto Rico.  Today’s delusions and episodes of crowd madness usually involve money.  Lots of money.  Think of the biggest chain letter in history and multiply it by a hundred million.  

Whether it is about climate change, running your car on your own urine, or phenomenal returns on investment, when someone says that he’s an expert and he knows that X is happening right now or will likely happen in the future, and that other experts like him agree, grip your wallet like a Nigerian.  Anyone who has a grounding in Critical Thinking recognizes two logical fallacies in play here.  One is the basing of an argument on the knowledge of experts (argumentum ad verecundiam).  Just because a group has a reputation does not mean it is right.  (Thomas Sowell has a great line about experts:  “Intellectuals are the last people to realize their own vast sea of ignorance surrounding the small island of their knowledge. That is why they are so dangerous.”)  And, face it, experts know shit. When measured over time, experts are only slightly better than random guessing—chimps throwing darts at a stock page kind of random.  And it doesn’t matter what field they are in—stocks, technology, marketing—experts are no better at predicting the future than the guy on the street.  Don’t take my word for it, though, have a read through these: Wrong: Why the experts keep failing us and how to know when not to trust them, The Management Myth:  Why experts keep getting it wrong, and Everything is obvious: *Once you know the answer

The Opinion of Experts Matter
 
The other logical error, that other similar experts agree, is the Consensus or Head Count fallacy (argumentum ad populum).  The flaw is that just because we are told that a group say X will happen is not evidence that others say in X will happen, that they even believe in X, or that they even believe X is true.  The existence of consensus cannot tell us whether X is true or false. 


The Consensus Says We Should Hang Him. Now.

All this brings me to the socialmania that’s swept like a prairie fire through the advertising and marketing industry, through boardrooms and the minds of CMOs (there is no one more gullible). Social media, the experts tell us, means the death of traditional advertising, television, marketing, whatever.  And because all the experts agree that social media will change the landscape for good, you need to change your foolish ways, change if you want survive in the new future of social marketing.  How does one change, you ask?  Well, paying the experts handsomely to tell you what you need to know is a start.  Then develop programs that introduce social marketing into your media mix—plans that can never be measured in any meaningful way. 

Well, eventually nuns stop mewing, wieners suddenly grow back, and chickens start coming home to roost.  It seems that some people have broken free from the herd and are starting to see things for what they actually are.  One is Todd Wasserman of Mashable Business who on Tuesday 28 November, wrote: “The social media marketing backlash has begun. Blame the unlikely team of The Onion and IBM. The former dropped a pitch-perfect take-down of socmedia “experts” right before Thanksgiving. Then Big Blue released data that showed Facebook had almost zero effect on Black Friday sales, and Twitter actually had zero.”

If you haven’t seen The Onion Video, have a look.  It is brilliant:



The IBM study Todd mentions declared that its own study found that shoppers from social networks , such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, generated 0.34% of online sales on Black Friday—down 35% from 2011.  Twitter?  Effectively 0%.  These figures are not even close to rounding errors.   

I foresee the Socialmaniacs being held to account and measured against their wild and unfounded predictions soon (I won’t say when).  I imagine, tho’, they’ll behave like most experts and come up with more excuses than “Joliet” Jake  Blues.