Helping Others See Beyond The Surface, Makes Blogs True Digital Weapons Of Mind Change
Changing other people's minds, launching small and large Calls To Action, influencing and persuading others, providing insightful tools and pointers to facilitate self-discovery and personal understanding: these are the most powerful applications that individuals, small online publishers and passionate researchers can make of blogs today.
Helping others see reality from new and unconventional viewpoints.
Photo credit: Elen
Well beyond making money (which may become a positive and profitable consequence of the above) blogs are indeed the most powerful mind-changing and influencing technology available today.
Blogs are the true digital weapons of a bloodless battle for liberating our children from the omnipresent numbing, propaganda-based, uninformative news delivered daily by the pervasive, suffocating presence of traditional mass media.
(See also: The Power Of Open Participatory Media And Why Mass Media Must Be Abandoned
and Why Mass Media Are Bad: Weaknesses And Limitations Of Commercial Mainstream Media)
What you probably have not realized yet, is how significant and influential this young heritage has already become.
"...there are more than three million webloggers, in the U.S. alone, who have trying to persuade the thinking of others on the Web as a prime motivator - including, but not limited to, the 57 million adult Americans who read weblogs today."
The ustoppable change-mind, wake-up, get this!, human-based re-awakening system is at work!
Yes. It is now official: Besides hurdles of individuals using blogs as their creative, personal outlets, dedicated to their friends and family, a very significant percentage of respondents has identified blogs as their most successfull mean to call others into action, by increasing their awareness and understanding of issues, problems and new opportunities which were not known to them.
This Content Nation is shaping the world's communications far faster and deeper than even the most sanguine enthusiasts for personal publishing can imagine - and they've only just begun.
Not only.
Traditional publishers benefit from this little army of courageous small and independent online publishers who acts as their best marketing and distribution agents bringing the best of their content to the very micro-audiences that are most interested in it. Or as media expert John Blossom more effectively puts it ...."media outlets have an opportunity to have their content - and advertisements - drawn into communities driven by the opinion-makers who consume them."
This yet unreported Content Nation of mind-changers, callers to action and soul influencers, is a true nation of small, online independent publishers, whose citizens are only beginning to understand the importance of their role.
The following short report/commentary from Shore.com chief executive editor, is a seminal piece which I truly recommend everyone to read:
Content Nation: A World of Personal Publishers Declares Their Influential Citizenship
by John Blossom
A recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that most of the people in the U.S. who are publishing weblogs are interested in a creative outlet for communicating with friends and family.
But a significant percentage of survey respondents see influencing others as a prime motivator in publishing weblogs.
If you scale up the survey data for weblog influence-seekers to its likely global proportions you wind up with the 65th largest nation in the world getting the attention of the third largest nation in the world.
This Content Nation is shaping the world's communications far faster and deeper than even the most sanguine enthusiasts for personal publishing can imagine - and they've only just begun.
What does it mean to be a publisher?
This was a fairly simple question to answer little more than a decade ago. But now with weblogs (what is a blog?), wikis and other easy-to-use publishing tools that make it easy for millions worldwide to express themselves online, it's a question with very fuzzy answers at times.
A recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project gathered an interesting picture as to what kinds of people are generating their own content online and why.
The study found that the major reason most people use weblogs (52 percent) is to have a creative outlet, with only 7 percent citing making money as a major motivation.
In other words, for most people just the joy of publishing is enough to motivate people to give it a try. We're creative beings by design, for the most part, destined to shape our thoughts and feelings into personal publishing artifacts for the world to discover.
But the Pew study shows that many people want to have a platform as well as a creative outlet.
29 percent of respondents cited motivating other people to action as a major reason for weblogging, with more than 61 percent saying that inciting people to action was either a major or minor reason.
A similar 27 percent want to influence other people's thinking as a major motivator. The Pew report played this factor down in saying that "just half say they are trying to influence the way other people think" to highlight the pervasiveness of less public uses.
But wait.
If, as the report says, there are about twelve million adult bloggers in the U.S., then that means that there are more than three million webloggers in the U.S. alone who have trying to persuade the thinking of others on the Web as a prime motivator - including, but not limited to, the 57 million adult Americans who read weblogs today.
Let's round this up to a global guesstimate for a moment.
A recent survey by comScore Networks gives us data showing that the U.S. has only about 22 percent of the world's Internet users.
Using that figure as a corollary to scale the Pew data that would give us more than 13.6 million adults in the world trying to influence other people via weblogs alone, much less other personal media.
That's a pretty small group out of some 6.5 billion people in the world, but it's significantly more than all of the professional publishers in the world put together.
Or, to put it in perspective from another angle using recent data, if this group of influencers were their own country they'd be the 65th largest nation in the world.
There is truly a Content Nation out there, a growing body of opinion-makers who are influencing individuals and institutions as never before on a wide variety of issues.
This is not to downplay the wider and more playful nature of weblogs revealed in the Pew data: it's very important to recognize that the creative content which entertains us is coming from a vast pool of people who are going to absorb our general attention more and more as people use the Web to find authentic views of the world.
But it's equally important to recognize that the pool of people who view weblogs and other personal media tools as ways in which they can have a say in all kinds of matters - personal, politics, business, finance - reaches far beyond the handful of well-known webloggers who are cited in the mainstream media.
Individually the influence of these publishers is relatively insignificant - a couple of dozen people at most would be typical for many and far less when you get down the Long Tail curve.
But even if these webloggers averaged only about twenty-four unique individuals who experience their posts, in sum the nation of people potentially influenced by webloggers seeking influence would be the fourth largest nation in the world - comfortably ahead of the United States in population. The enormous potential of this publishing medium in the hands of people who want to influence others poses both opportunities and challenges to both traditional publishers and society as a whole.
For traditional publishers, the influence and attention gained by these millions of micro-audiences has the potential to dilute greatly both the attention and the influence that other sources of opinion and insight offer.
Yet the data from the Pew study reinforces the view that major media outlets are probably benefiting from the presence of webloggers in a large way: 72 percent of the polled bloggers look for information about politics online, significantly ahead of the 58 percent of Internet users who do so in according to Pew research.
With influential webloggers large and small, media outlets have an opportunity to have their content - and advertisements - drawn into communities driven by the opinion-makers who consume them.
But this may pose a problem for advertisers in the long run: if people are listening to webloggers as a primary source of content, how much attention and influence is going to be left over to be harvested by traditional advertising in traditional media outlets?
The influencing of opinion on many commercial, public and personal levels is shifting far more rapidly than we may imagine as a result of personal publishing technologies such as weblogs. It requires both publishers and producers to be armed from the start with content that's ready for both a consuming audience as well as for an influencing one.
The nation-sized scale of influence-seeking webloggers does need to be taken in perspective: it's only a fraction of total audiences that read them as of yet and a relatively small portion of people producing them with any degree of regularity or quality.
But the Pew data suggests that 80 percent of webloggers have started publishing only in the last three years: Content Nation's influence is in its infancy.
Photo credit: Kiyoshi Takahase Segundo
Content Nation is a nation of publishers whose citizens are only beginning to understand the importance of their role.
To those who can, I say: be a citizen.
To those who discount their influence: be prepared to have them change your mind.
Robin Good: (or better, be prepared to see the world around you change more rapidly than usual, thanks to their influence, story telling, discoveries and open sharing of ideas. Nothing beats the potential that sharing information can have on humans: this is the real digital weapon of our future).
Robin Good and John Blossom -Reference: Shore [ Read more ]
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