Why we Medium?

By Nithya J Rao

Each day, according to the Digital Buzz Blog

• 294 billion e mails are sent
• 2 million blog posts are written
• 4.7 billion minutes are spent on Facebook
• 864,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube

So why do we ‘Medium’ and add more content out there? The answer might be quite linear.

The desire to record details of our lives is as old as handwriting itself. Early diaries were mostly kept as public records with the modern diary originating in 15th century Italy where they were used for accounting. The travel journal has been around since the early Christian pilgrims began traveling to the Holy Land in the first century after Christ. By the late 18th century, scientific and artistic explorers such as Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, and Darwin began recording their discoveries. Leonardo da Vinci had filled 5,000 pages of journals with ideas for inventions and clever observations.

Writers, artists, and other creatives such as Tolstoy, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Anais Nin, and Sylvia Plath have used the diary as an integral part of the creative process.

In the 1960s Dr. Ira Progoff, a psychologist in New York City, began offering workshops and classes in the use of what he called the Intensive Journal method introducing the therapeutic potential of Journal-ing.

By the 1980s many public school systems began formally using ‘Journal-ing’ as a way for students to develop independent thinking and introspection skills.

The advent of the internet and the boom of the Blogging Era created opportunity for digitizing these books of ideas, secrets and general reflective commentaries on life and perhaps sharing them with readers in a speed unprecedented.

It is but natural for us to then form colonies of echo chambers, break them purposefully and engage in a voracious consumption of each other’s thoughts and ideas. After all, we are craving connection, down to the very cell of an organism and what better way to reach out to another being, than through their most vulnerable musings?

Today, Medium not only encourages arm chair speculation but also construction and deconstruction of theories, ideologies and entire governments.

Did we really think the millennials would pass up such a lucrative opportunity?

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Nithya J Rao is a Shaper, from the Bangalore Hub. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @susanryan4. Learn more about her at www.nithyajrao.com

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