Look At Me, I’m Alternative…Just Like You!

Blogging is a way for us to have our voice heard. It’s how we broadcast our thoughts to the world at large. We develop an audience. We widen the conversation. It allows for a greater variety of discussion. We give our unique viewpoints on…um…what everyone else is talking about.

Social networking exacerbates the problem. It creates a sameness in the conversation, because everyone is looking at the same subject. In early May everyone was talking about how great Twitter was. In late May everyone was talking about how annoying Twitter’s downtimes were. This month it’s Friendfeed and the fragmentation of conversation.

Did you hear the one about … oh … you did already …

Different viewpoints are all well and good. But how many different viewpoints are you going to get among hundreds of blogs all addressing the same topics? People see that something is “the buzz” because they read it on Scobleizer. Then they talk about it on their own blog and link back to the original articles.

They probably develop more immediate traffic this way – it’s the fashionable thing after all. It’s easier to continue a trend than begin one. But how much value is being added to the wider discussion? Doesn’t the conversation just become circular, and inaccessible to new readers? When we talk about the topics that everyone else is talking about we’re not adding originality.

OK, we’re all talking about the same overall topic – social media. But it’s rarer to find an original subject than it is to find an article similar to something you’ve already read. That’s not beneficial to the long term development of social media. It keeps it insular, it doesn’t widen the conversation. We’re happy enough, people come and visit our sites and comment on our thoughts, but there’s not much new material being developed.

If everyone is special then no-one is

The derivative nature of these posts and the discussion stops us moving forward. Social media is failing to widen functionality and accessibility to the non-techie, the non-early adopter. Its highly cliquey when it should be as open as possible.

We think of ourselves as specialised, as interesting, as unique. But in many ways we’re as “unique” as the emo kid who listens to My Chemical Romance like millions of others. Who thinks his angst and his emotion are something special. We think our voices are important in large part because they are our voices.

Don’t be a dedicated follower of fashion

That internal conversation is important of course, because we’re honing and developing the media and its services. There can be new perspectives on popular topics – for example I always find Alexander van Elsas tends to offer an original viewpoint on the buzz. But that can’t be the only conversation, we need to extend ourselves.

We need more original thinking in the blogosphere. I’m going to challenge myself to do this, and I challenge you to try something similar, at least from time to time. If something is the buzz topic that week, then don’t write about it. Refuse to write about it. Write about something completely different. Don’t continue a conversation, start one.