“I decided to write this after Kony 2012 went crazy on the internet this week. Like it or not (People find something wrong with everything), Kony spread because it had a real, valuable message. A message worth spreading. Yet people continue to focus on the mediums that spread messages, rather than the actual messages themselves. And when the message is good, they will criticize”

(Apologies is this article seems scattered and jumps from one topic to the next, I wrote it as I thought it. If you can keep track, awesome. It touches on people placing huge focus on the mediums that carry messages, and not on creating messages worth spreading across these mediums. It also then moves onto our egos and how money, fame and page views dictate a lot of bloggers daily online behaviour. I decided not to edit it, instead leaving these thoughts as they appeared in my mind. It is long, but I think this one deserves the time. )

The world is full of messages these days. Mostly messages that don’t mean much. Some are useless, some are funny, some messages will stick with us for a minute, an hour, a day. Rarely does a message on the internet last for more than a day. Yesterday’s news is waiting to be trampled upon by a bigger and better story. As a blogger you’re only as good as your last article, which means that most of us are shit. There, I said it.

I don’t do this for money, for fame, for any of that. If I claimed to be blogging for that, I’d also claim myself a failure. I do it because I dig it, it makes me happy. If people read it or not, that’s OK. The point is, everything on here is something I made and that’s what counts to me.

Some of my pieces make me laugh, some I think could be way better. But you can’t be on form all the time. Lance Armstrong peaked for the Tour De France each year. If I can write one great or even amusing article a year that get’s spread, then I count myself a lucky man.

I’m online a lot, not always commenting, but rather listening. I don’t Tweet all day, and I rarely retweet. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to spread your particular message. I acknowledge it, and I listen to it. I’m there, I’m just not noisy and in your face. Not everyone needs to shout everything from the rooftops. We’d have everyone standing on roofs then, and that would be a bit mad wouldn’t it?

And from my constant viewing of the online world, I realise that we’ve got fewer and fewer messages to spread.

Once upon a time blog posts were crafted like a fine wine. They were meant to be found in years to come, to impart joy upon those who read them. A good blog post is timeless. They were made by writers who cared more for their word and their happiness than anything in the whole world. They didn’t care about pageviews or click through rates. They had something to say, and they had a unique way of saying it. Now blogs are just reposted messages from the major news sites around the world. And I have no problems with this, each to their own and I’m not a hater.

However I do miss the days when it wasn’t about the money and the numbers and the ‘fame’ Because now we’ve got a million different ways of spreading messages, but no messages to spread. We’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr and everything else. Not to forget e-mail, newspapers and magazines.

But because we all want to be the first to break a story for some or other SEO reason or whatever, we rarely bother crafting real pieces.

And there are people who are online gurus or ninjas or whatever the hell they claim to be, who essentially claim to be online specialists. And they sit around predicting.

Predicting the next best phone, the next best social network platform. The next best picture sharing platform. The next best way to manage your professional CV online.

“Oh but this is better than Facebook and this thing is better than LinkedIn and I prefer Instagram to Camera+”

The problem is, with all these platforms, we’re spreading ourselves so thin that we no longer have time to cultivate a proper message in our head. We no longer have time to actually have some peace and quiet. Peace and quiet leads to the greatest ideas in the world. But we don’t get ‘silence’ because we’re on one network, consuming content at a rapid rate all the while trying to keep up with the next big online platform that some fool is trying to predict.

You know who the most successful people in the world are? The ones that aren’t always talking and sharing online.

The greatest people in history were not on Twitter because it wasn’t around then.

Edmund Hillary? First man to climb Everest. Wouldn’t have cared about Twitter even if it was around.

Mandela? Didn’t Tweet.

Ali? Nope.

Neil Armstrong? Ha.

Richard Branson uses Twitter, but his empire was not built online.

These people didn’t need what we have now. They didn’t need to spread 100 messages a day. They spent their entire lives working at one message. One message, one idea that would change the world, and that’s what they did.

The problem these days is this: You’re only as good as your last message, and a message rarely lasts longer than a day. And we’re getting addicted to daily hits, so we need to make a message a day. Even if it’s not that important, we’ll make a message. We’ll take someone else’s message and add our spin and put it on our blog. We’ll check Google Analytics and count the hits. Hit us up again, shit that feels good.

We’ll wake up earlier tomorrow to get to the news stories first, so we get the story posted before that other blog. Shit, that feels so good.

And then when people make a message worth talking about, we’ll rip it to shit because we didn’t think of it first. Take for instance the latest Drive Dry campaign. I loved it. I went to the media pre screening on the Monday afternoon, and chatted with Justin from FoxP2. This wasn’t just a message that they were conveying because that’s their job, they were conveying this message because it actually struck them. And they were conveying this Drive Dry message because they had worked on it, and created something out of nothing. But I sat there and realised that not everyone who said they were coming had actually arrived. Why? Because it didn’t interest them. They weren’t being paid to attend, hell maybe they don’t care about drunk driving. I went to the event not only for the message and the advert, but to meet the people behind it. Behind every message that you slate, there is a real person that has put their time into making this message. Sometimes for the money, but at other times because I believe they genuinely care. This was one of those times.

And then it get’s released the next day and everyone has their say, saying it’s not effective and it’s not this or that and not as good as the first Drive Dry advert. But you know what? It’s a shit load more than they’ve done for drunk driving. If we all sat back and criticized, we’d be lying in a pile of our own shit wondering why no one is fixing the plumbing. We just don’t seem to want to acknowledge anything these days, because we don’t want to see other people do well. We cannot be man enough and just stand up and go ‘Well done, that was a great piece of work’ We’ve always got to cover up for our hideous egos that continue to enter the room fifty paces ahead of us.

We’ve always got to have the last word, because clearly we are better than everyone and therein lies the problem with the world today, we are a community yet first and foremost we think of ourselves. We’re connected via so many networks, that even if we don’t know each other personally, we still know each other. But while we are technically a community, we’ll always fight for our place at the top of it. Competition is good, no doubt. If everyone was equal what would be the point? But when you’ll walk all over other people to get to the top of issues that trouble us all? Then I’ve got no respect for you. There are just certain things that we as society have to work together on. Hating on an anti drink driving campaign? Why not support it and spread the message because it concerns all of us. Sure if you don’t agree with a new advert that promotes a cellphone network, go and hate away. Cellphone networks are not an issue we as society need to unite and agree on. When we start fighting though about genuine messages that concern all of us, and we let our egos get in the way of these messages being spread, then we’re a generation who may as well take a gun and shoot ourselves in the head.

If you can out of the stillness of your own mind think up a genuinely important and unique message and spread that message to the community, then I applaud you. But for every person like me that applauds you, there will be 5 calling you a doos and saying you’re not good enough.

Why did the KONY 2012 message spread? Because it is a real message with a real issue at hand. This message doesn’t need a particular medium to spread. All it needs is the video itself. In the old days this would have been on TV and would have been spread via e-mail. But we’ve got video sharing websites now and they’re easy to spread messages on. The point is, it spread because it is worth spreading and it taps into something we don’t often tap into these days…empathy. We don’t give a shit anymore, we’ll walk all over anyone to see the view from the top. But this video levelled all of us, tucked our egos away for 30 minutes and had us all unite on one issue. It’s amazing really what humans are capable of when money, egos and pageviews become irrelevant. When the message trumps all of these things, you know it is one of the biggest messages of our time.

Imagine if we all spent our lives just working on that one message in our head, the one we really care about. Wouldn’t the world be a better place?

Unfortunately our daily senses are assaulted and attacked on every front. We’re tricked by advertisers and marketers. We think a new car and a bigger house and a capsule espresso machine and a tablet computer are what we need. When what we actually need is some respect and empathy.

Alas, this blog post will just be in the archives tomorrow, and in a week will have slipped from this front page. Kony will one day be captured or just die by himself, and we’ll continue to fill up our lives with LED TV’s, iPads, iPhones, LOLcats and clothing manufactured by the children of the world.

Our forefathers fought for something. For future generations, for a better world.

We’re fighting for our popularity, while the world slips right through our hands. We click ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ and think global warming will go away and all the worlds starving children will be fed. We tell people on Facebook that we’ll do this or that for some or other cause, but 15 minutes later we’re back to our usual daily routines.

With the worlds collective knowledge and such a connected world, we could become the Kings and Queens of the universe, fighting to make things right.

But when I look at it objectively, for the good majority of us, we’re the Kings and Queens of promise.

(Insert cheesy song ha ha)