Beyond Bedlam: How Consumers and Brands Alike Are Playing the Web

Abstract

The new marketing order, as played out on media platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, is so unlike the order it is displacing that it might seem like bedlam, an asylum of sorts for ideas intelligible only to their creators. And yet, surely, something systematic is going on. It must have purpose; all the vigorous uploading, posting, commenting, and sharing must be generating results. We claim that the new order is, in fact, rule-governed, and the rules are the rules of play.