Pulse Blogger: Perspective

Everywhere you look on the internet today, you find opinions.

Everywhere you look on the internet today, you find opinions. Smart ones, dumb ones, forgettable ones, unforgettable ones, even those ones that words have no description for.

The cyberspace is so populated with these kinds of opinions which have come to shape and reshape a lot of perspectives, and will continue – as long as the globalization of the world keeps happening – to shape perspectives.

When a post goes online, the chances of it getting any attention are due to a lot of things – and I’m not talking about the tech wizardry involved. A catchy header image, a catchy headline, a popular author or celebrity, a popular website, vivid colours, and for the sensitive, really good writing and arrangement amongst other things make for these posts’ readability.

While the criterion varies with people, the poster hardly has to do much thinking to get his picture or work online, because, perspective. This raises a lot of questions when one actually sits down to think about it, for example, what does a well-performing post have that others lack? A number of answers can also be put forward to answer these questions, for example, that most read post could have better arrangement that others. But as a newbie, I have come to discover that it is way beyond these basics. It is all in the reader’s mind.

The play of psychology in even the internet has been a bit underemphasized. A sure fact is that some things have been censored for the sake of keeping online content suited to appropriate audiences, but it goes beyond that. Picture this scenario: two rival sports websites get their news from the same source; one beats the other to break the news, and gets less views than the other who posted the news later (again, ignore the tech wizardry).

This happens because overtime, the more visited website has appealed to readers’ mindsets by reshaping their perspective on how sports news is reported. This is a logical example, but a more illogical one is when rumours get more traction online than actual news – illogical because rumours are as they are. Again, the play here is the reader’s perspective. The readers see what they want to see not what they should see, a result of subliminal alterations by exposure to certain kinds of content for long.

This might prove to be a bone of contention, reason being that perspective is an intrinsic quality of the human being. But in as much as we are all creatures of habit, a break from said habits will lead to instability, and then lead to formation of entirely new habits which erase from our minds every trace of the former ones. Only strong, disciplined minds can control this part of themselves. Just like every other thing in this life – weather, biology, politics, society – the internet changes, and along with it the perspective of the population which it serves. There was a time when Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo De Lima were everyone’s favourite players, but along came Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

There was a time when Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenneger ruled the action movies scene, but along came Marvel and DC and their colourful superhero cast, Tom Cruise, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel amongst others. These changes have shifted the focus away from the “old” to the “new”, and no matter how reminiscent we get, our habits have been reformed and we’ll stick with the new anytime, any day, else we get swallowed in the current without hope of making it out alive.

Now how do we appeal to the perspectives of the readers online, my fellow newbies? Asides from learning the ropes of the technology involved, and mastering the act of content creation, the best way is to go with the flow. Yes, it might irk you the traditionalist, but if you want to gain that online presence, that’s your best bet.

Those media which you feel are offensive, totally avoid it – the internet is like a university, you choose your course of study and stick to it. An artist who draws Leonardo da Vinci-esque drawings is better suited to a museum (again, thank God for the internet, museums now have websites) than to a blog these days, just as a writer who writes Shakespearean eulogies, poems, plays and stories is better suited to a Broadway-esque theatre scene.

Ride the wave, and you’ll be thrust into the readers’ perspective.

 

Short Bio:

My Name Is Chimamkpam Umeh-Saboyo, Geology Undergrad and aspiring writer. I love the Earth and everything contained. My interests span every subject imaginable and unimaginable, but my strengths reside within my solitude. God Lover and struggling Saint. In my mind I'm the best in the world.

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