How ideas grow big
I found out how to make ideas grow big, by accident. It was never intended as a strategy. All I did, 10 years ago, was I started to blog to my heart’s content.Why?
I saw the way we interacted with the world around us change. It changed because the order of power changed, due to the growth of the internet. New voices could be heard, new connections made. And I decided to speak up about why stories should be treasured in the whole of this and the exploration into it’s new forms, in a wide and growing variety of platforms, should be encouraged.
Stories per se will not change, but it’s formats and distribution will. And the format and distribution is highly relevant to the power of a story (remember what happened when books could be printed on scale).
I felt we needed to find empowering forms to let all people share their stories and that every story relevant to you may find it’s way to you whenever you needed it most.
So far, we have definitely succeeded in that first part, giving people the ability to share their stories. But we still have a lot to do, to achieve the next part of that goal, making it work in a more relevant way.. But I deflect..
So here I was on my quest to ‘save stories’.. And I was not alone. The beauty of our growing interconnectedness, at that time, was that like-minded others could find me and I could find them. That sounds so simple now. But it made all the difference in the early days. At first we where a small community, widely dispersed around the world, Sweden, Finland, Norway, United States, Australia, the Netherlands. How else would I have known about these pioneers, so fast, if the world had not opened up to me through the internet? How else could we cross fertilize our ideas through our mutual writings, available through our blogs, comments and other postings. By using creative commons I wanted to enable others to freely share my writings.
Now as we all know, ‘success has many fathers’ (or in this case probably “mothers”, as many bright woman have dominated the early debate).
And this is quite literally the first “secret” ingredient to making an idea grow big. It is NOT wanting to own it. If ideas are to run free how can they be selfish? Few people know who first wrote the early wikipedia entries on ‘crossmedia’ or ‘transmedia’.It does not matter now, it was there to share, learn from and most important; to build upon. So, did we define this?
By no means. And that is the second “secret” ingredient for an idea to grow big. It needs breathing space to grow. To open up to new thinkers and tinkerers to contribute to the stack. To make it their “own” idea as well.
Meanwhile as things go, and get adopted over time, the debates of what a “thing” like ‘transmedia’ and ‘crossmedia’ is get dilutive (Go on, Google it and find yourself rambling). However, and much to my cheerful surprise, people are starting to get it and move back to the core message again;
This is all about stories. Our own, the ones we live in, virtual or real, the ones we share, see, hear, fabricate and experience. About what they mean to us. But still I wish for more…
Would it not be wonderful if the techniques of transmedia and crossmedia, or any technique for that matter, would evolve to service people with relevant stories. The ones that help them best when they need it most. Let’s see if we can get that focus again. Maybe then we can make it really work it’s magical ways.
Stories really do have the power to transform.
