The data is mind-boggling:
Twitter users send 500 million tweets a day. A billion people watch 6 billion hours of YouTube videos every month. Advertisers are falling all over themselves to get at Facebook’s 1.3 billion active users. And WordPress says 400 million people view 17 billion blog pages each month, including 120 million new posts and comments.
Those are staggering numbers, but who generates all that stuff? Countless millions post online to promote themselves, build their personal brands and grow their networks. They believe it’s somehow beneficial to their business and their career. For many, it is their business and their career.
However paltry and misguided the pursuit – while highly profitable for Google and Facebook, the vast majority of that user-generated content is done pro bono, i.e. for free – a surprising amount of it is business-related. It crosses all borders and touches all demographics. And that does spell opportunity for enterprising folks to capitalize on.
While that may seem harmless enough, it’s not. To say it’s gotten a little out of hand has got to be the mother of all understatements. All that content is affecting us in ways we’re not even aware of. And it’s profoundly influencing our next and probably even our current generation of executives and business leaders, and not in a good way.
I think Steve Tobak is right, in principle. I already said it in one of my articles… there’s a lot of people out there talking about a huge number of subjects..and theories. In my view, some are good ’cause they are from real life and experience, and some are less, ’cause they fly in the face of all experience, and focus fundamentally on ourselves, not taking account of the others. There’s a but. There are dark sides of all this, and there are the white ones. The positive element lies, in my opinion, in the fact that all this massive information revolution may (at least) forge the consciousness of what’s going on, and develop a greater public awareness of ourselves, as human beings. We know, I know that lot of people have been making stupid assumptions, and it’s really up to us what we’re gonna do with that. At the same time, I don’t think there’s any point in dismissing everything a priori. Thank you.
Thanks for driving the essence of this Article home so very well, Massimo!
Thank you Dennis !