thinking is the new black

I am so giddy. I have been stirred by conversations at work again about the future of marketing, audiences, and social innovation.
My belief is everything can be understood through critically engaging with discourse. Yes EVERYTHING. Now I know this is not news, people with far more breath taking an intellect than mine such as Foucault, Althusser and “my guy” Marx were saying it a long time ago. But I am saying it now and in plainer English.

Discourse is power, because it is embedded with ideas and beliefs that reinforce institutions of power. Therefore discourse legitimises power.

I have been doing discourse analysis in my research for a couple of years, plus I have taught a series of workshops called Language Media and Power 2 years in a row, so why the renewed enthusiasm? Why am I all in tizz about discourse? We’re doing beyond exciting things with content and media, and social spaces in my team at work. Furthermore we’ve been talking and sharing our ideas A LOT. Not just amongst ourselves, we’ve been knowledge sharing with the rest of the industry, and of course with our clients. But the word discourse seems to be banded about with more and more regularity.

Just yesterday inspired by the recent postings of the Kaiser et al I was talking with one of my colleagues about shifts in marketing discourse, discourse effects and whether as an industry we are already preaching to the converted when it comes to network effects and social spaces, who exactly is “the audience” and do they really care? One of my fave quotes of late comes from another marketing blog, but I’ve read so many in recent weeks it is v. annoying I can’t remember where I saw it, but it was about the over use of the word conversation at the moment and the headline was taken from a consumer who said something like ” I don’t want a conversation with my toothpaste”. It really tickled me. It’s so true.

This is going to sound incredibly arrogant but at some level I think the team where I work are evolving marketing discourse. But the struggle, call it a moral struggle if you will, that I’m personally experiencing is that I feel that sometimes the marketing industry is employing discourse to validate its own existence. See ideology, power it’s all there. So exciting.

I’ve been working on some ideas for a few months around my role as a content and media analyst to do with digital ethnography and discourse analysis. Trying to marry my background as a social scientist and neo-Marxist scholar, with what I do in marketing. Not easy on an ideological one, on the one hand critiquing consumer society and errr on the other ultimately selling people more stuff, and I am certain orthodox and old skool Marxist alike will have a great deal to say about my appropriation of Marxist theory. But IMHO I think social innovation through marketing and espescially digital marketing is the way forward. I am not sure what to call this ism yet because I haven’t established a discourse. FYI: You don’t have to tell me that establishing a discourse is a substantial ambition.

That’s all I can say at the moment. Lots of thoughts of digital divides, class division, CSR, marketing, disrupting discourse and social change running around in my head….

More to come I hope. And I also hope I can tie this all together somehow in to a more coherant idea. Although when exactly I am not sure, because I am really really going to finsih writing up my thesis in the next few months. So they’ll be less of this and more of that as my mind turns to my own research.