After Ahmedabad and Bangalore serial blasts we friends were having this general discussion. Deepa tweeted about blogging about the incident and what can be done and this is what Nimish and I replied.
KV: @ddeeps what will blogging do? We will blog and few ppl will read and agree n nothing will change.
Ddeeps: @kv Oh never despair. We talk, we discuss, we think, re reflect, we are spurred to action, we support – all things happen.
Nb42: @kv 98% of the people are decent citizens. 2% are extremely stupid. But it’s us 98% who’s at fault for electing the other 2%.
KV: @nb42 exactly, but do you think we 98pc ppl can blog n change those 2% ppl?
Its almost 5 years since I have been blogging, but still I am not clear about the impact of blogging on general people, or how we can change the opinion about certain things?
I am not talking about the tech people, the people from our gang or bloggers. When we write about technology and tech news/reviews/bug fixes/hacks it is to be accessed by similar minded people and they find solutions online. Or when The Economics describes Robert Scoble as Chief humanising officer and quotes ‘he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world’ then I completely agree. Because people who had views about MS, hated MS or had no opinion, they all belonged to the tech world, the internet world. That was the place where Scoble was hero and everyone listened to him.
But once we try to apply same things to normal world specially in country like India where most of the people do not have access to internet, where politicians still try to get votes based on caste, region etc rather than what actually people really thinks, the situation is completely different. If we talk about people who blog or we interact on twitter we see most of them have rises above the level of these small issues and cannot be misled by politicians. But those are the people who are our target audiences too, they are already aware of what is happening around, they know problems and solutions too, they do not have power to change it. They can blog about things but who is going to read, not the politicians or general public.
There are these small incidents that happen in our daily life, for example when I went to get a medicine from medical store, most of them did not give me because I wanted to just have one injection. They wanted me to buy a complete pack of 10. These medical store guys act like a mafia and sell medicines in bulk only. Every medical shop I went to I got the same answer ‘buy 10 or don’t buy it’. Where do I raise my voice against it? Who should I complain to? In the end what did I do, I just wrote a blog post. [I never posted that because I knew that post will have no impact]
Push button publishing might have made everyone a journalist, but what good it is when the ideas can’t be propagated into real life. I have another question too, few months back we had a Blogathon India, and it was really a nice effort. I read all the posts and learnt a lot from them, I tried to change few habits too. But I don’t think it caused a lot of impact, its purpose was to increase awareness, but I think it just tried to help those who were already in better shape. We need to reach out to common people and authorities, but blogging isn’t going to help much.
So, I want to ask all the bloggers what is the solution? Do you really think blogs will have impact someday? In a country where 1/3 of population is trying hard to get two meals a day, we can blog and can change perspective of people? I have no clue on this. At this point I was thrown with another question, did you vote? What or how did you decide who to vote for? Maybe answer to this question will lead me somewhere.
