New Media Rules! (Who I Really Am)

Every time I see a new campaign by old media (newspapers) to retain/assert their relevance -- much less the supremacy and monopoly they once had, I'm reminded of the class I had on the burgeoning World Wide Web, in which we were instructed to choose our aliases carefully so that nobody could deduce who we really were except to know the person we fantasized to be in the fictional world of cyberspace, that of course, would always just be a plaything for those who would never really matter, but allow us to attack those who really were somebody, from the safety of our anonymity, and to propagate and indulge endless escalating flame wars and abuses as the ultimate exercise of powerful anonymity.

Thereupon I boldly concluded, the best alias was to be myself -- because everybody would assume that it was just another fictitious person(a). And since no serious writer would write and publish on the Internet, I would, and thus be the writer on the World Wide Web, or the World's Writer, as I titled my homepage -- confident that nobody would be so presumptuous as to have beaten me to it. Of course, that was all blasphemy, as I also proceeded to regard and pronounce the email/homepage/blog, as the literary genre of these times -- and the Interrnet, the only publication that mattered.

In seeing all these things early on (much less come to pass), I often laid claim to being the leading-edge writer of these developments, confident in the knowledge that nobody was doing what I was doing, because they didn't think it was possible -- to regard the Internet as the legitimate, and all the previously sacrosanct publications as "obsolete." For I recognized that in a competitive world, the advantage goes to the side recruiting from the largest gene pool -- and not the one restricting their membership to their own exclusivity.

Formerly, that may have been the advantage of (trade) associations -- that they could control that field by recognizing those who had a right to participate in it, and on what terms that they would dictate and adjudicate. It was simply unthinkable, that people might (could) create their own rules, that made a lot more sense and appealed to a higher intelligence, than simply the desire of a few to remain at the top no matter what. That was how the old games used to be played.

All that changed dramatically overnight, once every field of activity and interest, could be participated in by anyone with the desire and confidence to. That has always been the underlying foundation of participation in any field of human interest -- that confidence to. Many gained that confidence by being in those associations that could (would) enforce their compliance through their own brute force and other means of coercion. Much of the time, it was simply the failure to recognize the legitimacy or even existence of the other -- hoping that they might lose interest and go away.

But some have a deep and abiding interest (love) of what they do, and so they do it regardless of the approval and approbation that society goes to great lengths to reinforce, in what they call education. It is an indoctrination into the (political) "correctness" of that society and culture. It begins in the schools but doesn't end there. Many other interests/groups take advantage of that conditioning as the basis of their own control over individuals by some more organized and powerful group. Few think to challenge it once they are within that association -- thinking it is the association from which they derive their strength and power, and without it, they are nothing, powerless and weak.

Thus the skill in the new media (World Wide Web), is knowing how to be the whole of consciousness rather than the partisan (sectarian) part one usually see advocated -- the whole rather than one of the innumerable, irrelevant and powerless parts -- that the old institutions and old media, don't seem to catch on, but are evermore insistant, that we all have to go back to playing their old game, by their rules and their adjudication, rather than the new media rules!