There’s always been a feedback loop and new innovations to tighten it.
~100 years ago Macy’s started a radio show that enabled them to quickly put out new messaging to their (mostly female) audience and see how it affected shopping behaviour pretty much “instantly” when compared to their previous paradigm of running newspaper ads. They also saved $100,000/yr doing so — the equivalent of ~$1M/year in today’s currency — demonstrating how radio had significantly tightened their feedback loop when compared to newspaper.
An artist can accomplish the same at a live show. With the artist seeing the response of a live audience (their focus group, in a way) while trying different things in real-time. This is how quite a few musical trends started.
TV, books, music, arts have all had cash flows that are responsive to decisions.
The person you're replying to still has a point, that you probably reinforced with the example of Macy's: the time constants of a given feedback loop can and do influence greatly the necessary input (the money they saved) to get to a similar or better state (what you mention as tightening the feedback loop).
The current world brings it down to a really small reaction time (i.e. the system can change dynamically within 1s, give or take an order of magnitude). I believe there is still room for even faster feedback loops (say, when a google-glass-like device reads in real-time a person's biometrics and feeds that to a system that optimizes what the user is interacting with), and I would not be surprised if Facebook already had considered that since they deal with VR devices (Oculus).
But I guess what I’m getting at is, this isn’t anything new. The media has always been an effective social engineering tool, whether or not the social engineers at the time were aware of it. And the last few instances where faster feedback loops via more effective media helped one company get ahead didn’t spark the end of the world. Not unless newspapers were the beginning of the end. And then radio. And then video. And then TV. And then netflix and social media. And then the screens that we’ll put on behind our eyelids so that we can watch our favorite shows without opening our eyes, or whatever facebook is cooking up.
~100 years ago Macy’s started a radio show that enabled them to quickly put out new messaging to their (mostly female) audience and see how it affected shopping behaviour pretty much “instantly” when compared to their previous paradigm of running newspaper ads. They also saved $100,000/yr doing so — the equivalent of ~$1M/year in today’s currency — demonstrating how radio had significantly tightened their feedback loop when compared to newspaper.
An artist can accomplish the same at a live show. With the artist seeing the response of a live audience (their focus group, in a way) while trying different things in real-time. This is how quite a few musical trends started.
TV, books, music, arts have all had cash flows that are responsive to decisions.