AndrewLaGrange.Com

We live in a world of democratised mass media, where anyone with an internet connection, even if just over a mobile phone, CAN access a large global audience.

But the operative world is WILL they? The sad answer is… probably not.

The same market forces which make little newsletters printed on LaserJet’s unsuccessful versus the mass production of newspapers, make the little hobby blogs, even with daily posts (sort of like mine come to think of it… ) irrelevant in their own sea of mediocrity versus the morass of powerful media brands.

We even see this in sites like Amatomu in South Africa; blog aggregators are about the herd; and the herd follows what it knows… media outlets they are used to, such as state news and conglomerates. One look at Amatomu’s News and Politics section, and you would think that the provincial Daily Dispatch is South Africa’s equivalent of New Statesman or The Economist.

Of course, that isn’t the case. So… what is a poor little blogger or website owner to do? (besides getting bought out by a big media group, or buying traditional ad space to advertise their site).

Well there the dark arts of SEO find themselves prevalent. And people turn to all manner of tools to get high search rankings, to keep the traffic (even if not relevant) pumping to their site. They mention teen sex in shopping malls, post pictures of Elisha Cuthbert, (maybe with my mentioning of this, i’ll get lucky on Google? chances…) and say ‘Hi’ to one another in a billion blog comments across the world.

What does this do? It means people who wish to put up meaningful content and commentary from the sites visitors are left in a world where their voices are drowned out. That sucks… but what can you really do about that after all…

There are growing rumblings that search engine optimisation, across the globe, should have some sort of ethical charter, to determine the differences between the good and the bad guys. Even BMW was banned from Google due to spurious SEO practices; how then can the little guy try and get ahead when even MNCs feel forced to protect their standing with dodgy practices?

Well… he can’t. He has to hope that the quality of writing and interaction will win out. And if it doesn’t, and its simply found vitriolic and useless, well then the site owner will have to accept the judgement of the audience. Oh well…

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Filed under: Business, Design, Media, Society, ethics by Andrew la Grange