State of Art

It’s abnormal to think that technology has made the world easier. It's dead wrong and you need to know better for your benefit. A million things have changed, but, the hardness of execution is still the same.?

The world never gets easier and problems have been there since the beginning. They only get to change in nature, but they have been there! They flow like air or water, taking the shape of one generation or century to another.?

For instance, there was a time when getting your work of art to the public was the hardest part of the job. One could develop novel ideas but accessing a platform was the real challenge. For your work to be seen or accessed, you had to go through a body of bodyguards known as publications who safeguarded and held the keys to the public. They had the key to all the platforms hence you had to please them for access.

Times have changed, and now publications don’t have all the power. They have the least. The internet holds most of it. But this doesn’t mean things have gotten easier for “artists”. Things are the same if not harder. Now, with millions of users—the masses—freely roaming around the internet like atoms in a calcium element, the challenge is getting those of similar interests together in the vast internet ocean.

What this means is, in the golden days, audiences had already converged at publications and media companies thus all that was required of an artist to succeed was to bypass their gates. But now, with no gates, the audiences are scattered all over. And it is now the responsibility of the artist to attract his audience; people with similar interests to what he or she is offering. It's now for the artist to make them listen and fight for their attention with tens of thousands of other artists and clowns. Therefore, the market is soaked with artists, and everything is everywhere.

Gaining an audience is the new challenge as publications and media companies lack power in the Internet era. The power is with the consumer; who is irrational with a short attention span—he’s attracted to every neon light that his eye catches. Therefore, you might get them to listen today, but it’s harder to keep them around as the publications did back in the day. The reason is that there are so many options to explore and no one to guard the gates of entry.

A piece of advice, to get your voice out there, you have to stand out and be the best at whatever you do. And from there, it's best to form your mini-publication. Go onto a platform like YouTube and create something like Woos Media Company if you make funny video clips. With that, you don’t have to ass-kiss the gatekeepers, but you have to entertain and be relevant to the millions of users. They might be many and ready but getting them to converge in one place for you is the decade's challenge.

Now, getting to stand out and have a unique voice is a whole different bag of bones that needs a whole different set of tools for excavation. But the main point of this talk is for you to get it in your head that things haven’t got an inch easier; they are either the same or harder.