PR-Bridge

This is the first part of a three-part post examining the communications lessons drawn from a short romp through American popular culture. Today, I will focus on the CBS hit television show Survivor. Next, I will tackle the NRA. The last installment will focus on the so-called “Tea Party” movement.

Despite what may seem like a tenuous connection, there are significant communications insights that can be pulled from these entities. Importantly, what they reveal has consequences for professionals who make their livelihood interacting with mass audiences. They also show the tight link between popular culture and communications.

As scholar Gary L. Harmon explained in a 1983 article in Studies in Popular Culture, “The goal of popular culture study is a better understanding of what we as participants in mass culture believe, fear, hope for, and gain or lose as a result of that participation and of how we ‘process’ and use popular culture in our private and public lives.”

Given today’s popular culture-soaked society, there has never been a more necessary time for studying culture and its consequences, particularly as a means of communications.

Survivor

Another season of Survivor ended with the “Finale” and “Reunion” shows airing last night on CBS. For the second straight competition, arch-bad guy Russell Hantz watched as a jury of cast-out castaways (who he manipulated to get to the finals) voted someone less deserving the $1 million winner’s purse. Russell played a brilliant game, yet did not win, because the people voting for him could not get past the reason they were on the jury and not in the finals — his cunning. One would expect, in this season of experienced Survivor contestants, that the ultimate vote would be based on skill in the confines of the game. If someone beat me again and again and again in a competition, I might hate them for it, but I would also hold a great deal of respect for that person as a more skilled competitor.

The irony in the way Survivor determines its winner is that the people “voted off” get to decide. From a viewer’s perspective, the way the jury ultimately votes is often laughable, at best. The game — so many jury members somehow forget that it is a game somewhere between being eliminated and joining the jury — is described as “outplay, outwit, outlast,” yet the contestants that excel in this avenue are not rewarded for their skill. The hypocrisy is rampant when it comes time to vote.

In last night’s episode, for example, hero Rupert Boneham congratulated himself for exemplifying heroic characteristics, without considering (remembering?) his own actions that were outside those boundaries. Benjamin “Coach” Wade was another hypocrite, often talking about ideas that touched on values and ethics, but then not walking the walk. At the finale, he wondered about whether he could change his image during the all-star season, after watching himself on television and seeing that he acted like an arrogant jerk in the past. The live audience applauded when he reported that his Survivor experience made him a better person, but once again, these were just words.

The continuing success of the game show is in the way it reflects society. The communications lessons emerging from Survivor are instructive:

• Left to their own devices, people almost always make decisions based primarily on self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
• When thwarted, one’s focus becomes even more hyper-self-centered, basically elevating gut reaction and anger over critical assessment.
• The “general good” is virtually nonexistent [see the first lesson].
• Despite what people learn in their lives about judging others based on merit, etc., image is often more important than one’s actions.

This kind of insight into people and the way they create their personal worldviews is invaluable in the communications world. First and foremost, it points to a basic flaw in the way organizations think, which hinges on extensive/intricate structures, planning, enacting, and reacting. Taking a cue from postmodernist thought, I wonder if most of the “strategic” work done in organizations isn’t basically busywork disguised as an attempt at controlling things that are basically uncontrollable.

For example, I worked with a company that conducted annual strategic communications planning late each year. However, that work never got completed until well into the first quarter of the planned year and changed dramatically along the way — kind of basing the plan off of events that took place that influenced the plan. Hundreds of employees spent countless hours preparing the annual strategic plan, wasting untold resources and time better spent actually doing necessary work, ultimately causing frustration up and down the corporate food chain.

What Survivor and other so-called reality programs expose is the utter focus on self-preservation that really drives people. As in the example above, workers may go through the motions of planning, but often without commitment to the effort or the outcome. Instead of paralysis by committee and structure, organizations should better link overall strategy/aspirations with those of their employees and audiences. Rather than assume that planning and structure equal control, organizations would benefit from a more realistic confrontation with reality. Perhaps in this way, organizational arrogance might lessen, where blinders cause companies to trumpet the “world’s leading” this and the “industry standard” that language.

Perhaps the challenge is simply a lack of context in which organizations operate, which creates a false environment. This translates into inauthentic practices, such as a hypothetical company that provides the funds to build a playground in a poor, urban area to curry favor with a minority constituency or key politician. As a result, true leadership is replaced by “wink-and-a-nod” management, which lacks authenticity or context.

Perhaps the overriding problem is that organizations are thought of as people in today’s world, rather than the false structures run by individuals that they actually are. The quest for power and its trappings leads people to act in their own interest first — just like the jury members on Survivor who punished Russell for his role in ousting them.