The Value of Mystery
the meaning of TMI in a world surrounded by it
Posted Jul 9, 08:30 am in business, consumerism, experiences, human nature, marketing, postmodernism
It was so recent, but it’s hard to remember back just a little more than 10 years ago, when finding out information about things was difficult and time-intensive. If you wanted to know about current events, you’d have to look up things in the newspaper and magazines, and use microfiche and Lexis-Nexis on subject headings. It all seems rather quaint and tedious now.
Now, of course, if you want to know just about anything, you just head over to Wikipedia or Google News and you’ve got pretty much every detail that you could possibly want in the span of a minute. The shift from before into after has been so complete, so thorough, it’s hard to believe that it was once so laborious.
I remember, as an elementary-through-high-school student obsessed with music, when I wanted to find out about my favorite bands and learn about new records, I’d have to hope that some magazine had printed an article about them in their most recent issue, and would have to scan through dozens of them at the bookstore. That was fine when I wanted to know about Guns N’ Roses because they were ubiquitous, but it was much harder when I wanted to know about, say, the Dead Milkmen, who I loved, and bought everything I could find by. For years, I never even knew the names of the people in the band, as everything I knew about them came from the scant liner notes on their records.
They had a track on their 1990 album Metaphysical Graffiti called “Do the Brown Nose” that was supposedly recorded live in Fargo, North Dakota— which for some reason I took to being an indication that that was their hometown. It wasn’t. They were from Philadelphia— but I didn’t find that out until much later.
Yet, despite the frustration and disinformation, there was something special about those times, when facts were hard to come by. There was so much mystery; not just in music, but everything. When I think back to those times, it almost feels like it was the Dark Ages, where the masses were left to piece together the world from what little information came their way, unable to gain a complete picture of anything without intensive research and concerted effort that had to first be funneled through a network of mainstream media channels that selected what information to share based on what the most people wanted to know about.
While I know that if the internet had become available to me in ’88 or ’89, I would have used it just as obsessively as I do now, digging up facts about every trivial thing, I realize now that not having information that I really wanted gave things an unattainable quality and endowed them with a sense of mystery and intrigue that is virtually non-existent in any form in the commercial sector today.
Alas, there are no secrets anymore.
I can find out the names of all the members of any reasonably well-known band in the world, and probably a lot about their personal lives too. I can know exactly where they’re from, what their music sounds like, I can download their album— anything— in a matter of minutes. And this is not only true of music, it’s true of movies, consumer products, celebrities, and almost anything you can think of.
There was a perverse pleasure in overanalyzing liner notes on a Pink Floyd record and staring at the weird, arty photographs to determine whether we were being sent secret codes. It was fun looking at Beatles albums and trying to piece together clues about Paul McCartney’s death. Nowadays, any such information would be either debunked immediately on the internet, or you’d be given all the information you were searching for at once, thereby eliminating the slow simmering that would offer a frustrating, yet satisfying stew of mystery. (The only time this doesn’t happen is when ad firms try to do some kind of slow-release viral marketing campaign that involves a bizarre collection of obscure websites and hidden clues.)
Of course, I have no one to blame but myself for looking up information when I do, but in a way, there was pleasure in being stymied by the barriers of the past; they had a way of imbuing life with a permeating and fascinating sense of the unknown that has sadly been depleted from the world.
It’s tough to say whether strategies to re-instill mystery into the world through a new product (or movie or band) would work these days as it had by accident in the past, at least in the way of withholding vital information. Many of the marketing channels through which the public becomes aware of things rely on having a lot of information in order to market such products, and consumer mindsets might have shifted into a mode in which they implicitly distrust or are negative towards anything that doesn’t have a lot of information surrounding it. Many would likely interpret a dearth of information on the internet about, say, a band or a product, as a sign of poor quality or untestedness, and would be wary of investing time or money.
Yet, I’m sure that mystery works, and can still be done, and I think it can be done successfully. Viral videos and marketing, for example are one way in which mystery has been reintroduced into the commercial world. There are many good examples of this, but the one that comes to mind immediately is the “Now What?” television commercials. In this series of ads, hapless everyday people are going about their lives when chaotic, unpredictable events occur, leaving them paralyzed with shock, their possessions destroyed, and the words “Now What?” and “nowwhat.com” imprinted on their faces, as they stare back at the smoldering heaps of twisted metal that were once their cars. No mention of a company or product is made, and you are left wondering what is being sold.
You know it’s someone trying to sell you something, but weirdly, you are stricken with this sense of not gaining closure. There’s a mystery that you want to solve. The human mind attempts to construct narratives, and without vital pieces of information, these narratives cannot be written. You want to know what company paid for this ad so you can mentally finish the chapter on it (it’s State Farm insurance).
Clearly, using mystery as a selling point is complex and can be fraught with pitfalls, knowing that interest does not necessarily translate into sales, and doing it in this way compromises your ability to imprint your product’s name into a consumer’s head. Yet, from what viral ads have taught us, it can be a phenomenally successful means of gaining attention and interest from a consumer base that is often bored and uninterested.