Revolution is a grossly overused concept these days. Half the products we hear about are “revolutionary.” Basically, the term has almost ceased to have meaning. There are, however, real life-altering revolutions that do happen, typically when we have an order of magnitude change.
The easiest to understand are when travel went from 5 mph to 50 mph with the advent of the automobile and from 50 mph to 500 mph with the development of jet airplanes. The world, of course, hasn’t been the same since.
The Publishing Revolution
The development of the internet has ushered in a new revolution, which I’m calling the Express Yourself Revolution. The order of magnitude change has been in the cost of publishing. For example, if you wanted to publish a book, not only did you have to pay for printing costs, but you also needed to pay for distribution costs to get the book into stores for people to buy it, and for advertising so people would know about it. The same was also the case with music or even a newsletter. For the record, in the 1980s, I was the editor of EMMS (Electronic Mail & Messge Systems), which was the first to cover electronic mail. It was printed and distributed on paper and advertised by sending out thousands of mailings to potential subscribers.
The internet has dropped the cost of publishing by an order of magnitude. Books no longer have to be printed and distributed by truck or physical mail. They can be distributed electronically, which means they can be downloaded from a central computer to your home computer. Furthermore, it’s free to upload your book to Amazon’s Kindle store. Amazon then takes its cut when the book is sold.
In addition to books, it’s also very low cost to publish a newsletter, which today are called blogs. Why blogs?I’m not sure, but they should be called blods or Blips On a Disk, which is what they are. All you need is a website account with a hosting company, which is from $50 to $150 a year, and a domain name for maybe $20 a year. It’s then easy to put up a WordPress site with your content. There are now millions of such sites on the internet.
It’s also the same with music. It used to be that you needed a bunch of musicians and expensive studio time to create music that you can publish. The music then needed to be placed on some medium like vinyl records, cassette tapes, or CDs, and had the same distribution issues as books or newsletters. Today, your home computer can be a powerful recording studio, especially with a decent analog to digital converter for acoustic instruments and vocals, along with keyboard-based digital synthesizers like Native Instruments. One talented musician can now do it all, including uploading the end result to several online music stores for minimal costs under $10.
The End Result – Rise of The Noise Level
As with all revolutions, the end result is an amazing change in human possibilities and behavior. Now that the cost of expressing yourself has plummeted, unprecedented numbers of people are doing exactly that. The result, however, is what you might think of as an under-the-radar revolution because as the content of books, newsletters (blogs), and music has exploded, it has created a noise level of me, me, me that is very difficult to rise above. There are now so many books, songs, and newsletters online that it has become hard to find them, which creates a particularly complex marketing problem for any specific content item. How do you get your content read or listened to?
The obvious answer, of course, is social media, which is a lot easier said than done. While you might hope that your content will get discovered and take off virally, that is largely wishful thinking for all but a relatively small number of the content items. But then if you decide to pay to advertise your content, suddenly the cost escalates well beyond what most people can afford.
Do It for the Sake of Doing It
This gets to the bottom line of the Express Me revolution. Since the cost is cheap to create the content, the content becomes its own reward. In short, good luck if you expect to get rich or even make a living through such publishing. Nevertheless, millions if people do publish their stuff with hopes of making it.
Content creator is a new career for many people who at least take a shot at it. While it’s hard to make it big in content creation, there are people who make it. Today’s strategy is focused around having a popular podcast or being followed on major social media sites like TikTok. People can generate followers numbered in the millions, which ends up generating thousands of dollars a month.
But there is probably a larger number who are doing it for the sake of doing it. If they hit it big, that would be great. But if not, that’s fine too. They write or do art or make podcasts. The bottom line is there’s an under-the-radar revolution going on today in which expressing yourself is its own reward.
As you can expect, the impact on our society and evolution will be profound, but unfortunately, we can only really make at best wild guesses what those impacts will be and what changes they will cause to our increasingly complex society.