Mantra of life

What is the mantra of life??? I don’t know, and don’t care... But what I just came up with is My Mantra for whatever-is-left-of-this-term and mebbe the next too... What I can see is that I have put up my to-do-list. When am I gonna do all that is still unknown and undecided.

PS – Making lists like these… that shud have found a mention on the list too.

Might soon start some of these. Wish me luck.

Pank..

Blogs an alternative to conventional media?

Article written for the Bloggers Park Contest at IRIS 2005, IIM Indore

The brief: Blogging as a phenomenon is picking up slowly but surely. While blogs neither have the reach nor the say as that of the mainstream media, it surely has a definitive impact among the internet savvy population in India.

My response: Bloggers are in many ways similar to mainstream journalists. They write on a public medium; on topics which are relevant to anyone and everyone. But that is where the similarities take a backseat to the differences between the two. Bloggers share their feelings without consideration for return or reward. Peer appreciation is all that matters. Quality of writing and readership takes precedence over the numbers. Entries are not made to fill up webpages or generate hits, they write not to impress but to express!

Bloggers are filling some voids in mainstream journalism, and connecting netizens in a very exciting fashion. Blogs are not about to destroy conventional media, but they are making an impact. Blogging is not just about having your own online diary or journal. It is much more than that. For example, recent issues like the Rashmi Bansal–Gaurav Sabnis–IIPM episode have brought about a distinct change in the way blogging is viewed. There is today a respect and implicit credibility a blog commands. Blogging today is about conversations among people in real time and real voices. That's what makes it sticky. Communities get built around these conversations, and these communities can well be stronger than the most well-knit ‘real’ communities one can come across.

View: With the mainstream commercial media dumbing itself down and catering more and more to looking at its bottom lines rather than content that is relevant, bloggers tell it like it is. They are not concerned about revenues or hits. They write because they want to share. Nothing else comes into the picture.

Allowing for some exaggeration, it is certainly true – and widely admitted by mainstream mass media – that these cyber-activists made a huge difference, not only in shrinking the world into a global village but also helping people connect with each other.

There is but one issue with treating blogs as substitutes for mainstream media – Reliability! You might take it as lack of authenticity or veracity, the fact remains that blogging still has to go a long way to attain mass followership. By definition, accreditation or verification cannot work for blogs, as for one the process itself will make blogging both cumbersome and expensive, and secondly that blogging is much more about opinions that any other form of communication, and that opinions will differ markedly from person to person.

That brings me to the often repeated question: Do blogs convert the personal into the political? Do we have personal issues and viewpoints being needlessly thrashed around publicly? Do people use the blogging forum as a substitute for a diary? Well, the answer cannot be anything except a ‘No’. But the saving grace is that people can and do choose what to read. Only relevant issues find readers. The 'dubious' content is lost in the big bad world of the web in seconds.

The mass media has historically had one yardstick in deciding what to publish or broadcast – that if the issue in question is in the public interest. That guideline gradually got translated to only publishing what was politically and commercially relevant, and today has degenerated further into publishing what is politically and commercially convenient. Case in point - In the US, the war on Iraq is condemned far more pungently in blogs that in the public media.

As marketers get niché and move away from mass marketing, it is only fitting that the media follows suit. A set of readers want and demand different news and views. They are not about to be satisfied with news mass produced and published. They want news that they are interested in, maybe even involved in. Try as they might, mass media like television or print can never service that need. That demands an intense first-person communication channel like a blog.

To conclude, the old adage - one man's meat is another man's poison fits in perfectly. What you read is different from what I read. But one thing is for sure... both you and me are today following blogs a lot more than we used to.