Am I Being Heard?

I used to run an interactive net radio show called 'radioactive'. This was long before the days of podcasting when broadcasting audio over the net was a novel idea.

The key to it all was the slogan and philosophy 'Don't just listen, be heard'. The idea being that the audience was so involved in the live broadcast (both on traditional terrestrial radio and simulcast on the net) via forums, chat rooms and voting polls etc that their interactions had a significant effect on the live show (in real-time).

This slogan spoke to a fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to... the need to be heard.

People just want to feel connected and understood. Why else would people check their traffic stats and blog comments like cocaine addicts (hide's head in shame).

But beyond our personal and very human need to be heard... writing our experiences down allows us to preserve history and learn from our past. And with all the new-fangled conversation tracking technologies... it allows us to get a great sense of our collective thoughts at any given time.

I found an interesting quote about all this via Signal vs Noise and I thought I would share.

Mark Ostroth 29 Mar 06Don’t glaze over Don Norman’s point about writing. This is right out of a 1960 essay by Loren Eisley, titled The Long Loneliness:

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly degenerates into fumbling myth and fable. Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.”

“Writing, and later printing, is the product of our adaptable many-purposed hands. It is thus, through writing, with no increase in genetic, inborn capacity since the last ice advance, that modern man carries in his mind the intellectual triumphs of all his predecessors who were able to inscribe their thoughts for posterity.”

So blog on my friends... the world is listening.