I was a mute… • 08.08.06
With the exception of some interesting lunchtime discussion with Steve Garfield, Micah Sifry, Jason C., Karina Longworth, and a few others, I was a rather mute participant of the Unconference yesterday. I did think of a few things to say here and there, but pretty much stuck to just thinking those thoughts strongly in the direction of the person I wanted to reply to or even saying a bit in the IRC chatroom.
At the very end, I actually raised my hand, but we ran out of time before I had the opportunity to speak up. We were discussing the signal to noise ratio on the web and Jason Pramas noted that his most popular blog post was this one, a review of Batman Begins, called Batman Shrugged, that begins: “What if Ayn Rand and Mussolini got together to write a Hollywood movie? The result would look something very like Batman Begins–the new blockbuster prequel to the Batman screen franchise.”
Now, what struck me as odd, perhaps even disheartening, was that Jason said something to the effect that he had pretty much stopped blogging, because it disgusted him that that was the story that got the attention rather than all the important other things he blogged about. This reminded me of the very beginning of the IRC chat conversation of the day when someone else noted that he/she hated reading about people’s cats on their blogs, and he/she asked for a moratorium on all cat blogging / a segregated cat-blogging area, so that he/she would never have to read that stuff and could come to the blog just for the important bits for which he/she read that blog.
Here’s the thing though: It seemed that most people participating in the Citizen Media Unconference were eager to initiate some sort of change via their blogging. Now, all the like-minded people in the room at the Unconference are most likely not the target audience of people whose minds we would most like to change. To a certain degree, for example, the target audience for a blog like Jason Pramas’ ideally is not the politically like-minded individuals who continually gravitate towards it, but all those masses of people who hopped on the kitsch of a post about Batman Begins. Whenever you have some watershed moment when the masses arrive because of a cat post, a off-hand review of a movie, or some other little contextualizing flavor-bit of your blog, that, I think, is when you should redouble your efforts to speak your speak, talk your talk, and blog your blog, because in those moments you can gain exactly the readers who don’t agree with you and who you most want to persuade.
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