Viral concepts travel faster than you or I could.  They seem to bounce from one hand to the next, one brain to the next, faster than comprehension can keep up.  They are fueled by the forward button and a thumbs up.  Their reach is only limitted by the network that they travel in. 

Every one will agree that an idea that goes viral is an idea that has power. But what sort of power? 

Way back before the World Wide Web, there was a forgettable B-grade horror film called The Stuff .  The story line was weak, but it started with someone discovering some weird Stuff oozing up from the ground.  For some reason, they ate it and loved it, so they packaged it up and sold it to the world.  

In today’s terms, this Stuff went Viral.  Everyone, everywhere wanted it and it was a massive success.  It went from first discovery to popular acceptance, in only a couple of weeks.  It is a marketers dream.  A self selling product.   Word of mouth marketing. 

But there was one problem.  It wasn’t long before people realized that The Stuff ended up eating your brain and turning you into a zombi.  A pity really.  People ate The Stuff and The Stuff ate the people.

Is it possible that some of the ideas that travel virally around our world today are as dangerous?  Would we really know?  We see information, concepts, products and services going from zero to world saturation in what seems like minutes.  A report or a video or even a joke can circulate the globe faster than any of us could, as it is passed from person to person, email to email.  Of course some of it is priceless, but there is a lot that is very popular but useless.  Some, I believe are downright dangerous.

Today, virality - rampant popularity - is seen as credibility.  If we hear the same idea coming from a number of directions, all in a short space of time, how could we not take it seriously.  If the sources that pass the message to us are usually trustworthy then we are likely to trust the message, and so we pass it on.  If something goes viral, it has received the people’s stamp of approval. 

In reality, all that going viral means is that enough people feel comfortable enough with something to pass it on to their neighbours.  Virality, tells us nothing about truth or integrity.  Virality is neither a test of quality or a guarantee of usefulness.  All virality is, is a popularity contest.  The concept on the move, is close enough to conventional wisdom to make it into your inbox and not outrageous enough to make you delete it.  It has the exciting flavour of something new and essential and so you forward it on or give it a thumbs up. 

This doesn’t give me much hope for finding wisdom in a viral message.  If it is really popular or widely accepted, then at its best it will usually be watered down, conventional wisdom with a veneer of something new.  It has to be old news to be accepted by such a range of people.  At its worst, viral messages can hold dangerous prejudice or hidden manipulation carefully cloaked in familiar and agreeable concepts. 

Try watching the front page of Digg for a while and see what patterns you notice coming up.  This is where we see viral ideas on the move.  Some are great, some are useless and some should set our warning bells ringing.  If something has made it to the Digg front page it is already in the viral process.  What do you see there?

Everyone wants to create Viral Stuff or at least to discover and pass on Viral Stuff.  It is power marketing, social approval and credibility all rolled into one.  A dangerous concept can travel just as virally as a useful one, so we have to use our judgement.  We have to be careful about our acceptance of Viral Stuff.  We have to be doubly careful of being the vector that transmits dangerous or misleading viral content. 

 ”Are you eating it or is it eating you?” (David ‘Mo’ Rutherford in The Stuff)

 

As humans we are fighting against ourselves almost constantly.  If not in outright war or aggression, then at least in our daily mundane actions.  How can we ever hope to achieve anything that helps our world as a whole? 

Blog Action Day is an effort to bring together bloggers from all over the world to write on one day, about environmental issues that concern us.  When I last checked, there were over 15,000 blogs registered to post about these issues today.  The problem is, that I expect that there will be about 15,000 different angles on environmentalism.  Who will be able to read them all and who will be able to bring them all together.  For a while this disappointed me because I thought of how little would change if 15000 different voices spoke 15000 different messages.  Who would act on it all?  Could anyone possibly gather together all of the different strands and weave a fabric to represent the best path forward for our world?  It seemed like a futile excercise - why should I add my voice to the chaos?

However, I soon realised that all of our environmental problems are caused by individuals.  Whenever a  new power station is built on top of an endangered frog, it is because 1,000,000  individuals demanded more power.  If these individuals didn’t waste so much electricity, then there would be no need for a new generator and so the frogs would survive.  This is the same story with most of our environmental problems.  They are all made up of the actions of a large number of individuals.  If only the individuals knew their strength.

Surely that is the secret to our environmental problems.  When we realise that our actions determine what happens in this world, then we open our hand to see a powerful tool for change.  Instead of feeling helpless to solve the problems, we realise that we are a part of these same problems whether we choose to be or not.  As a young uni student I chained myself under an excavator in a frantic attempt to solve a particular environmental problem.  It took a long while for me to realise that this excavator was simply building a road because individuals like me are obsessed with driving cars.  The more productive action for me would have been to save the time that I used protesting and attending court hearings, and use it to change my contribution to the world. 

That is all I want to write here, to give you more time to read more articles published on Blog Action Day.  Just remember that no matter what you read, it is hardly ever “them” that cause the problem - it is usually “Us”.  And as a member of “Us” you have at least as much power to make a difference by your actions as the next guy.

Note:  I’d also like to thank the organisers of this years Blog Action Day for making this event happen.  It is an amazing effort to get over 15,000 writing about anything on the same day, let alone something as important as our environment.   

Thanks

Tom

Our world is shaped roughly like a sphere and it spins on an axis, meaning that for each of us to some degree, our lives are cyclical.  As soon as we have experienced day, the sun disappears behind our planet and we experience night.  As soon as we experience summer, our angle towards the sun changes and we experience winter.  For each of these times there are normal activities that occur in our immediate environment.  For each of these times there is someone on the other side of the globe experiencing the opposite. 

When I experience normal business hours, chances are, you may be sleeping.  When I swelter in summer, you may be freezing in winter.  For every condition we are in, there is always someone, somewhere experiencing the opposite.  This includes economic recessions, and growth, droughts and bumper crops.  All sorts of conditions are balanced across our world, it just takes a bit of “Looking around corners” to see it.  How is this useful to people interested in making the most of their lives?

The first, obvious implication is that now business can be a 24 hour affair for most of us.  This is fairly routine for most companies these days - if it is not for yours, then you should make it so.  People world wide are demanding access to whatever you offer at times that suit them.  If you can supply, then you win, if not then they will go elsewhere.

The second implication is that while there is an on-season and an off-season for many pursuits, someone is always having an on-season somewhere.  If you are a surfer, there are always waves somewhere, if you grow rice someone is harvesting, somewhere.   

The third implication is the sense of balance that we can see in problems and solutions.  While Australia is short of water, Japan is short of land.  While some African countries are starving, the United States is killing itself with obesity.  Surely in our new interlinked world, we can find ways to balance these problems. 

You can see how these cycles can make living in one spot less restrictive now that we have instant worldwide access.  How much more so, when we realise how cheap international travel is these days in real dollars.  If you want to ski in the Australian summer, then you can jump on a plane and in 8 hours you can be on the Japanese powder.  If you want to fight malaria on the other side of the globe, then the cost of a plane ticket will seem like very little compared to the opportunities. 

There is a negative side to this apparent shrinking of the globe, but it doesn’t come from the fact that we are linking our world together, but more from the way that we use these links.  Nobody seems to complain that Greenpeace operates in over 30 countries.  People only have a problem when a multinational company discriminates against local employees.  Globalisation is one of the biggest boons to productive living that we have seen in a long time.  Embrace it and you take a much more effective part in the world, ignore it and you will be left behind.

The negative side of globalisation gets all of the press coverage these days.  Its about time that we focused on the positive side and really made globalisation work for us.

What are the advantages that globalisation holds for you?  

Thanks

Tom  

There is no better example of this than our use of the internet.  A typical internet user sticks to familiar paths.  They start from one site that they value and then follow links to others.  Or they begin with one effective search term and then follow down the stream of listings all coming from that search.  Either way, we end up finding what we are looking for because of the way it is linked to something we already know.  This is effective but limiting, because there are masses of information out there that that we know nothing about.  How do you search for something that you don’t know exists?  How can you hope to find something that is totally out of your field of experience.  If none of the sites that you usually visit link to a site then how will you find it?  If you don’t know or understand what is there yet, then it will be very difficult to search your way there.  Is there another way?

In much the way that you might stumble your way randomly through a forest and find new experiences, Stumbleupon helps you end up in all sorts of strange places with just the click of a button.  Instead of following familiar paths of search or links, by pressing the Stumbleupon button, you can end up miles from anywhere in totally unfamiliar territory.  What you find may be great or it may be terrible but that isn’t the point.  What we are talking about here is breaking out of patterns and finding exciting new directions.

If you are not familiar with Stumbleupon, it  is based on a simple little toolbar that you download  onto your desktop.  From there you can surf randomly (based on a number of categories that you define, if you wish).  If you press the Stumble button, you are instantly transported to a site or page that other Stumbleupon users have rated as worthwhile.  After checking out what is there you have the chance to evaluate it for yourself and then if it is any good, bookmark it and then Stumble on again.  In this way it is possible to visit a number of completely different internet neighbourhoods in a relatively short space of time.  Depending on how many topics you are interested in, it is possible to have some really revolutionary (if not altogether pleasant experiences) in only minutes.  Try adding Survivalist, or Counterculture or Medieval History to the topics you want to stumble and see how far your mind is stretched.  Better still, click the Stumble All Pages button and you could end up anywhere.  Last time I did this, I ended up reading an article written by Henry Rollins about weightlifting.  There is no way that I would have found this by following my conventional patterns, and I am not really interested in the topic itself, but reading it gave me a really interesting insight into the mind of some teenagers and what makes them work.  It took me back to what my life was like back then.  Most importantly it helped me see a very important principle about tools that  help us perform (I will write about that another time).

Randomizing your inputs in life can lead to all sorts of exciting discoveries as well as simply broadening your mind.  There is no better way to understand people than by experiencing parts of their world.  One way to do this is to use tools like Stumbleupon to view otherwise inaccessible parts of the internet.  If only the real world had a big Stumble Button on it.

My Stumbleupon name is Tomoleary.  Next time you are on Stumbleupon, introduce yourself and maybe we can help each other out in our Stumbling.

Thanks

Tom