Jan 09 2009
Refusing to follow the herd.
Associated content did me a favor yesterday. I had submitted an article on termites into the queue, a humorous piece with information on the little beasts and ways to try and control them.
I failed to notice upon accepting their offer, that they changed my title and deleted my sub-title. It turned out looking childish and boring. I went in the forum at Accentuate to whine about my plight and ended up going to bed without any consolation….
This morning I grabbed some coffee and fired up the comp, as usual I checked the e-mail and there they were, answers to my post.
The general consensus was that AC had changed it for the better, and that now it was more search engine friendly! Now that may be true, I could end up number one on google and everyone that saw it would pass right over it because it looked childish and boring. The first thing that came to mind when I first saw the new title was YUCK!
And then it hit me, like a line drive to the side of the head.
AC wants unique content to add to their library, or so they keep proclaiming loudly! Yet if you are daft enough to submit it, they decline it. They aren’t looking for unique, they are looking for a cow!
A cow is a herd animal, one that eats, sleeps and follows. If a single cow bellows, they all join in. If one cow leads, the rest will follow, straight across the pasture and into the slaughter house….
I don’t care to be searched, I write to be read! The Internet is evolving, becoming more aware of what a reader wants, learning to search for items that may be of interest to a human instead of a search engine.
Content producers, that is what we are called. Like an egg farm, we are given one purpose and are expected to spend our lives fulfilling it in an endless churn of typing out clones of everyone else’s typing, fitting it to a mold that may die tomorrow.
People used to be unique, free thinking beings, capable of surviving and thriving by our intellect and individuality. We are not intended to be herded by nature, yet we are being herded. A flock tended by shepherding stewards that want us all to be the same, turning in unison and reversing on command like a giant marching band with only one sheet of music.
I wanted to write because of the individual views I have read and the thoughts they contain, not to be chained to a post driven into the ground next to my computer with a set of rules glued to the wall that tell me what to write and how it must be written.
I do not write so that someone else can change it to fit into those same rules and force me into a collective conscious. I do not want anyone reading my work to think I was the idiot that produced the changed words that so invalidly express my ideals or misplace my personality!
I write to express myself and my thoughts, not to mirror another’s. Perhaps I have no niche on this firestorm called “Internet”, if getting one means I have to conform to herd animal tactics and their well worn trails, count me out.
The written word can be a beautiful thing inspiring emotion, thought and even life altering decision. It can also be hideous, hateful and inspire revulsion and yes, even boredom.
AC is working very hard to lock me into a niche, one of endless how-to’s, but you can only build a house in so many ways and if you lose readers along the way, nothing can bring them back.
If I drive them away that is one thing, if AC herds them off by changing what I wrote then what can I do?
Nothing I have written for AC is of Shakespearean quality, nor will it be, and if it were it would never be read with a new meaningless title.
Thomas H. Forthe
