Yesterday it has been five years since the Huffington Post, one of the most popular and influential blog portals and news aggregators in the world, has been launched. Just these days I have been reading book by its founder - Arianna Huffington. The book is called On Becoming Fearless...In love, work, and life. In the final part she wraps the story by discussing how achieved fearlessness could be used in personal life and in achieving social changes.
I find the following part inspiring in the process of thinking what factors would lead to the positive changes in the field of development. In other words, how much individual actions could help in the processes of common interest?
My optimism about our power to create socail change comes from the possibilities embedded in the concept of 'critical mass'.: When a change establishes itself in a few, it can quickly hit critical mass and spread to the many. To a physicist, critical mass is the amount of radioactive material that must be present for a nuclear reaction to become self-sustaining. In everyday life, critical mass is the phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell popularized in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread through the population like 'outbreaks of infectious disease.(...) Reaching critical mass is just as important in the latest fashion trend as in major political, cultural, and social change. Any new way of being and doing things manifests itself in the few before it spreads to the many. Social scientists have shown that a person's behavior frequently depends on the number of other people behaving in a given way. Whether it's an election, a protest, or a fund-raising drive for the local homeless shelter, this pattern can become self-sustaining and even accelerate once it passes a certain threshold of energy and involvement."
This, certainly, is not to deny importance and influence of institutional and systematic chnages. However, such changes are also at times started by one-by-one type of initiatives. Just like the new media ventures, like the Huffington Post, have influenced - for better or worse - contemporary media landscape.
Interesting. Think I’ll have to pick up that book.
I met guys from Huffington in London, at a meeting with Ministry of Sports. I found them equally innovative in press and mainstream media world as Jeff Jarvis - both introducing great solutions with new media - really in the light of potentially endangered business models of the industry;)
Although there is a lot of criticism from the traditional media towards portals of this type, I think that Huffingon Post definitely does valuable work in a smart way. For me, Arianna Huffington is one of the most influential media persons today and an amazing woman. Glad to hear that first-hand contact with HuffPo people made positive impression about their work
What I really liked about them is the humble approach to other types of journalism. We met them at a meeting with various hyperlocal projects, as well as Global Voices - so obviously very mixed crowd. All talking to Jeff Jarvis and representatives of the UK government - very informal meeting. I really liked the idea of being confident in their own achievement but leaving scope for further work and measurement of success - which obviously is needed to fight the criticism, but also openness to other ideas, other people to learn from! Big respect to them:)
Wow, soudns interesting.. i feel like reading it…