Paramedia – Expanding Reach In The Blogiverse

I started News Corpse as a direct result of my experience at dailyKos. I didn’t set out to seek attention or to promulgate my views. I was just drawn to the idea of being able to express myself. It was more cathartic than anything else. But absent the stir of inspiration, I might never have made this site manifest.

Now I’m getting about 2,500 visitors a day. I know that’s small in Kosian terms, but it’s 2,485 more people than I’ll run into at the coffee house I hang out at. And if just 100 Kossacks (out of 70,000) build sites like mine, that’s almost another dailyKos in terms of reach. The exponential growth of this message machine is mind boggling. And that’s where I see the most value emerging from this community.

Markos has set the stage for an experiment in communications that I call paramedia. It is not just an addendum to the conventional media. It resides on a seperate plane but can move in concert with it. Paramedia uses the same components as the conventional model, but uses them much more efficiently. In advertising, reach and frequency are the keys to a campaign’s effectiveness in influencing consumer behavior. By expanding reach, a message gains exposure. And for messages to take root in the public mind they must be repeated with reliable frequnecy. Frequency also places the message in close proximty to a consumer’s decision. These same concepts hold true for politics, journalism and citizen media. Therefore, it is important for those who have an interest in promoting the goals of progressive leadership, liberal ideology, and media reform, to participate in the discussion. You may not think that your role is significant, but it’s a cumulative formula and every contribution adds mass to the whole.

In a pre-conference post, Markos said,“Technology allows each and every one of us to be a leader.” But it does more than allow it – it invites it. It savors and rewards it, and spreads it like an infection, the likes of which the world’s body has never seen.

If you have something to say, say it. Don’t fret about who hears you. The reverberations of our cumulative voices extend out like waves and can inspire whomever they touch. Your signal in this wave pattern may not touch many people, but what if it touches one person who sends out more powerful signals? That’s your progeny. Some of us may touch 200, others 200,000. That’s really not the point. It’s like bands that never really got very famous themselves (i.e. Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Pixies) but got tens of thousands of teenagers to pick up instruments and take up residence in their garages and start their own bands, many of whom went on to superstardom.

As an artist, I would rather have that kind of legacy than being the next Warhol.

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