If you could say something to everyone in the world, what would it be? A message of peace? A call to action? A friendly greeting?
In eras past, this was an impossibility. With the introduction of radio and television, yes, you could reach a large scale audience, but it was fleeting.
Not only does the internet allow us to tentatively talk to billions across the globe; it’s also more permanent. Perhaps this medium will not be around forever, but when you put something online, it’s visible, and it stays there. Post something on your blog, and years later, you can reread it.
So, all of you online authors, what do you say when you have an audience of the roughly 2 billion internet users? In comparison to the personal tone of handwritten letters, posting something to that many recipients seems just ridiculous, but that’s what you’re doing.
Having The Scarlet online has been a true eye opener. It’s given us so much more insight to who reads what articles and why they’re reading them. How did they get to an article about Dean Little from last year? What brought them to a history of the hipster courtesy the Clark Historical Society? And even more interestingly, in what language did they read it?
Thanks to WordPress.com’s amazing stats page, we’ve seen articles read in a few other languages, redirected from Google Translator. What a world.
Just keep that in mind, next time you’re mindlessly posting something to your blog or Google searching. All text comes from someone.
Writings and Such 