On Influencing

Yes, I can see your channel with logo and background. Your great production value. Your giveaways. And your sponsors have an attraction to your audience reach.

But business would as soon sell out for cat videos. Checking Ask the Public and Ubersuggest will show the current searches.

Fickle are the keywords.

Is “each new technological medium, and the professions it spawns…more soulless than the last…no longer ‘reaching for the stars’ but aiming instead for the more lowly consolations of stardom?” While Wired’s concept of soul may emanate from a non-religious spirituality (and desire to be relevant), this has to give one pause. Technology will progress, but what does reaching for the stars mean?

They do have it right on the face of it: stardom does not console the soul’s reaching for relevance. Can’t the wisdom of masses be more than popularity? When does your truth voice have sway? What does mass-produced influencing bring to it?

  1. Concealed competitive hierarchies.
  2. Unreliable, concentrated-at-the-top spoils.
  3. Becoming a vapid mascot for brands.
  4. Failure to demand meaningful contributions to one’s community.
  5. Blurring between personal and professional roles.
  6. Mandated likes, shares, and follows of a life of frenetic people-pleasing and social conformity (Wired).

The author should be commended: people-pleasing and social conformity destroy. So question: what happens when your audience contradicts or exhibits fleeing your channel? What happens when you lose followers?

I do not want to say the obvious.

The time will come where you must say what you believe. Is your moral(ity) spread throughout the network? Have you lost yourself in cheers and accolades? The answers are as old as Augustus raising the thumb.

We understand the pressures, the shrinking of your circle of friends, but your dissolving self asks, what is next?

As I wrote in the poetry of my worst times, the top is here and there is nothing seen.

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