Do you ever scroll through the feed on your phone and wonder what on earth’s going on at the moment? Do you ever think there must be a reason behind all the chaos, but you’re not sure what it is?

That’s the current state of play for the culture that we live in. We’re living through an age of cultural chaos, but it’s not the “dancing-on-the-table-at-3am” kind.

The MRS Cultural Insight Conference was full of brilliant presentations addressing this chaos, both from a societal perspective (how to reduce rising violence against women on public transport) as well how we help brands navigate this world (helping milk become interesting again).

A world of divergent cultures

For a long time, mapping culture was relatively neat. You could look at what lingered from the past (residual ideas), what dominated everyday life and what was emerging on the horizon. Culture moved in something like a line. Messy, yes, but in one direction.

Then 2008 happened (many problems started then), the media landscape shattered into a thousand channels and politicians chose to become clickbait. Instead of culture flowing in one direction, it now spins off in multiple spirals, all at once. You can have a feminist reckoning like #MeToo rising at the same time as a resurgence of toxic masculinity. It is no longer a battle for which one will win – both trends thrive, both feel mainstream and both insist the other is the problem.

Finding cultural fluency in this world is hard, but semioticians Sign Salad gave a presentation about their work with Muller on finding news ways to make dairy cool again. The milk narrative has been stolen by the non-dairy alternatives who borrowed trendy codes from coffee, chocolate and other indulgent categories, while dairy milk still sits in metal trolleys in the supermarket. Their subtle repositioning of the milk category will impress consumers when it hits the shelves.

Another moment of cultural fluency was how Yonder Consulting worked with the Department for Education (DfE) to make teaching a greater proposition for Gen Z. Moving away from blackboard didactic lectures, DfE started to attract a younger audience by changing current archetypes (think Miss Truchbull, or Miss Honey) to create more modern, collaborative idea about teaching.

Society has changed

In my keynote opening to the conference, I talked about how we assess evidence. A short history of how stories travel shows that we’ve moved from an oral society (pre-1800, campfire stories peer-to-peer), to a literate world ( 1800 to 2000, including books, articles and long-form argument – indelible knowledge) to the place where we now live: a symbolic society.

In a symbolic society, meaning travels via short-form video, memes, emojis, stitched clips and hot takes. Instead of carefully reading, we scroll. Instead of evaluating arguments, we feel vibes. Evidence becomes whatever is emotionally sticky enough to lodge in our brain for longer than three seconds.

Given half the conference were semioticians, ethnographers and cultural strategists, this was reflected in numerous presentations. Space Doctors and Durex found ways to “say the unsayable, and show the unshowable” in their advertising, which is so heavily regulated that you can’t use the word ‘sex’ or show people kissing. If you read symbols for a living, a provocative bite of an apple becomes temptation, and goosebumps is code for stimulation.

Trybes agency, working with Pontes (a funeral company), showed that death is actually more about nature and rekindling life. We might be used to dark wood coffins in traditional, Victorian clad rooms, but going back to the earth can also be reframed through Scandinavian minimalism, with a garden full of saplings.

What does trust look like in this new world?

The new fragmented cultural landscape has enormous implications for how we truly understand one another, and trust was a big issue than ran through the conference. That issue was addressed head on by Davies + McKerr when working with HSBC, who wanted to become the most trusted bank in the world. A bold ambition in the current climate, and the research showed that trust is about reciprocity – a give and a get – where the promise to customers is more than ‘I’ll keep your money safe’.

Twitch expanded on this notion of trust in their work with Pulsar, who talked about how they had created an online community where the users are the creators of the platform, putting that idea of reciprocity to the fore. Twitch, as a company, are almost bystanders as the platform gets created by the users, for the users. Almost the golden pillar of trust.

2CV and Transport for London (TfL) hit the audience with a very sobering presentation on how rife violence against women still is on public transport. Diving deep into the numerous coping mechanisms that women as young as 12 put in place when travelling across London showed how trust can be destroyed in a drunken second. TfL couldn’t change the way men behaved, but 2CV showed how to create a sense of safety through the built environment, through making better use of lighting on platforms (danger often happens in the shadows), and having regular announcements on empty platforms (to give the sense that people are still present).

What happened?

Oen thing most presenters agreed on is that the big cultural earthquakes can be traced back to the 2008 financial crash. Ever since then, the dominant story has been economic stagnation, rising costs and shrinking futures. If you don’t believe politicians will fix it, or that cultural heroes look anything like you, mainstream culture starts to feel like someone else’s party.

People build new cultures. High-agency subcultures promise that if the system won’t save you, you can save yourself – get rich, change the country, save the world. These new cultural narratives have a formula – the appeal to an identity (who do you want to be?), a community (who’s with me?) underpinned by a belief systems (a clear line on right and wrong). These three pillars are what I describe as the cultural trinity.

In a symbolic age, understanding those hidden rules of culture isn’t optional. The wonderful thing about the Cultural Insight Conference is that we have an army of researchers who can see this new cultural world with clarity.

Oliver Sweet is head of ethnography at Ipsos