Live on the Coke Side of Life

I should probably explain my reasons for posting a Coca Cola advertisement. Well, here’s the story: after I finished watching the four videos due for Tuesday, I realized they all heavily emphasized global networking and connectedness…or to sum up, “we’re all in this together.” In the back of my mind, I remembered there was a song titled “We’re All in this Together.” However, when I searched for it on YouTube, all these videos popped up for High School Musical. I’ve never even seen that film before! From what I’ve heard about it though, I was reluctant to post the height of teenage sappiness on my blog. I then searched for other songs with the same title, and I found the above video. It is still super-cheesy, but 1) it is one minute in length vs. five minutes 2) how could you not laugh at the absurdity of it all? 3) I figured I could “interpret” it in ways to match this week’s discussion.

 

First of all, notice that the people in the video are surrounded by translucent bubbles. If the film-makers had added a nice purple border to those bubbles, what we’d have then is a perfect reference to Anil Dash’s talk about networking. According to Dash, because we have new tools and better networks, we have the ability to transform institutions. These “tools” include the highway, twitter, and the internet, which have served to streamline our networking process with other people.

At fifteen seconds in the Coke ad, the viewers are given a bird’s eye-view of people in their bubbles navigating the network of roadways. In the center of all these roads and “networking” is a large building, symbolizing institutions. Dash proposed, “If you have the right network, things become transparent, and you could sort of peer through the wall into an institution and think about the ways it can be changed.” However, the institution in the Coke ad is obviously very solid and not at all transparent. Directly following the image of the institution is a scene where a police officer approaches some teens and gleefully accepts the coca cola they offer him. These two scenes in combination reflect another one of Dash’s critical questions: if networking is so powerful, why aren’t (nontransparent) government officials striving more to network with us?

Suppose you saw that same scene with the police officer in real life. In your mind, would his casualness undermine his credibility or authoritative power over you? Or would you trust him more because you could better relate to him? The coke symbolizes more “casual” networking mediums such as blogs or Facebook. How many of you knew that as a politician, Barack Obama is unprecedented in his use of social networking? (Check out the article here.) And yet, in light of the Snowden leaks from this summer show, does networking really make an institution more transparent? Or is it dangerous for a government institution to be more transparent, whereas for commercial institutions, transparency is more to their advantage (as proposed by Clive Thompson)?

Okay, moving on to another analysis: at thirty-three seconds in the Coke advertisement, a massive crowd forms, and people are laughing, dancing, chugging their colas, and having a good time. The scene is very bright and sunny—it’s summertime on the beach. This part of the ad reminded me of Chris Anderson’s speech titled “How web video powers global innovation.” Again, the coke represents a networking mode, but this time, the mode is specifically web video. The conglomeration of people on the beach represents Anderson’s idea of crowd accelerated innovation. Individual innovation can be accelerated by the crowd—or millions of people watching web videos—because the crowd itself “shines light [on the idea] and fuels the desire” of the innovator. For the most part, I whole-heartedly agree with this theory of crowd accelerated innovation; a group of people collaborating together present all sorts of differing perspectives and ideas that one person can’t necessarily come up with on his own. However, as Thompson also mentioned in last week’s reading: “Several [people] pointed out that secrecy can be necessary - CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn't consult everyone.” I think I can safely say, though, that Steve Jobs is an outlier to the trend and that isolated innovation is rare indeed.

The Coca Cola advertisement ends with the world in a coke drop and the slogan, “Live on the Coke Side of Life.” This portion of the ad speaks both to Seth Priebatsch’s “The game layer on top of the world” and Jane McGonigal’s “Gaming can make a better world.” Just as the world in the ad is immersed in the coke drop, so is our world inundated by games. According to Priebatsch, the game layer is “all about influencing behavior.” When people play games, they are influenced by certain “gaming dynamics” such as appointment, influence and status, progression, and communal discovery. Because so many people play games, these gaming dynamics could actually be used to affect our physical world. For example, McGonigal revealed three different games—“World Without Oil,” “Superstruct,” and “Evoke”—that encouraged people to solve real-world problems in a virtual setting. Obviously if the game was designed to reflect the world as we know it, solving the problems in the game would theoretically present solutions to real-world problems we face today. (I didn’t buy the majority of McGonigal’s speech—gaming “brings out the best in people,” really?—but I found her proposal at the end quite fascinating.) The Coke slogan could be revised to read, “Live on the Gaming Side of Life.” Live in a virtual world, and perhaps by doing so, you could make the actual world a better place. Does this sound like a feasible idea? Or is it just another futile attempt at utopia?