I discovered everipedia yesterday, and duly created my entry. Little did I know, how seriously weird I am.
I naturally assumed that everyone thought like I did about new services such as this. I immediately used my entry to publicize everipedia and myself at the same time, with the idea that the more people who put their entries up, the more useful the service becomes. This is what I had assumed the Better Person Project and Better Fashion Project people would do. I had visions of students and businesses adding themselves and their research to it, forming a community, networking etc.
I was a bit disappointed that visitors seemed to assume that I was going to sit and fill the website. Either of these research tasks are pretty mighty to do on your own. I imagined that providing the resource was sufficient, and that people would create a resource for themselves as intended.
All the recent trends in social media point to specialist fragmentation. Whether that pans out for you or not depends on a number of factors; whether your web format is simple enough (mine isn’t); whether you are marketing sufficiently (I don’t); whether you have an online network of enthusiastic bloggers punting the idea for you (I don’t) etc.
What I did not know, was that I am an unusually collaborative and cooperative person, and that I am pretty unusual in my ideas about sharing good ideas and information. I assumed that everybody used their flushes of enthusiasm to benefit other people as well as themselves. They don’t.
I think that this is very sad. The internet has brought people together, and what do they do with it? They misunderstand, they misinterpret, they argue, they discuss, they self express but do they cooperate? Not really. They just assume that someone else will be doing it.
I wonder how people expect things to go if they continue to go only with what some giant PR agency or marketing monolith has told them is cool? How do you think the world will develop, if we are socially isolated, badly educated and easily convinced that a label determines what is fashionable? What happened to spontaneous group formations and diverse interest groups, promoting interesting creative and social action in collaboration or opposition to others? Are we really turning into thoughtless consumers, who imagine that someone somewhere is throwing money at something for no apparent reason?
From an era of free speech, freedom of action and reaction, in my lifetime, we have ‘progressed’ to being a nation of inactive, demanding and thoughtless zombies, waiting to be told what to want next. It is not healthy already, and this is only the beginning.
Officially I am now rather popular on everipedia, when I look at the entries of even well known people. In about 24 hours, I have spread the word to a million or so people (by facebook count) and have some hits not only on my profile, but raised awareness that people can put themselves on the site. Now imagine if everybody did the same thing. The site would become useful. A rather more realistic and less snobby version of wikipedia, with more imaginative responses. What on earth could be wrong with that?
Instead, I imagine that it will become another tsu, which is far better for you than facebook. Still relatively small, tsu shares revenue with users, and everyone is ignoring it. They will sit on facebook, having their data plundered, looking at ads and having their posts ignored unless they pay for them, but they cannot manage to find the energy to click on a new website, far less switch the computer off and do something else.
All hail Candy Crush Saga, and the tedious posts of some housewife that has a thousand likers on her list. That is what the world boils down to apparently. The spirit of the people is candy crushed.
That could get very expensive for you, if you are a small business or trying to get your ideas out.