Japheth Omojuwa: For bloggers only – Part 2 | #SaveBagega

The power of new media realities is that everyone who cares to have a voice now has a voice.

The world has not only changed, that change is in itself increasingly changing. While survival in the old world depended on how well one could think outside of the proverbial box, these days to be at the very top of the world you must do away with the box in its entirety. You don’t need the box. The world is our space and this space is endless. To be at the forefront of the cascading events that define and are redefining the world, we must bench mark ourselves against these realities. Whether or not we move on as a people or country, the world will continue to move forward. It is on this premise that I seek to address the quasi Bloggers who have suddenly realized that Bloggers should not exist in the Nigerian conversation space. I don’t find this funny but I find the part where these same folks use blogs to pass their message across as absurdly funny. It is like posting bills on walls about not posting bills on walls. This is of course not absurd in a place where people use BlackBerry broadcasts to warn people about BlackBerry broadcasts. It is certainly normal to see this as normal in a country where serially indicted public officials emphasize the need for transparency and accountability. This is of course absurd if we benchmark our common sense on the expectations of the world.

The power of new media realities is that everyone who cares to have a voice now has a voice. In days past, I’d need to send a “well written” article to the Editor of a Newspaper platform and first of all hope that the parcel reaches his table. The second prayer would be that he cares enough to open it, read it then consider it for publication. The probability of having our voices heard was stacked against us. Today, that probability is to our advantage. All I need is a blog post. Not all Bloggers will have the reach of the most popular newspaper platforms but some Bloggers indeed reach a lot more people. In fact, an average Blogger has a much larger potential reach than an average newspaper. A Blogger with a small reach could trend once or twice a year but the chances of having an article that’d reach that many people via conventional platforms are a lot more limited. The blog post will always be available to anyone around the world with access to internet – in the absence of firewalls – but same cannot be said for paper based publications. Why do you think a lot more Newspaper companies are taking their online presence just as serious as their offline presence?

Yesterday morning I decided there was a need to speak up for the children of Bagega in Nigeria’s Zamfara State after a friend had reached me about doing it. These children are in danger of death if the remediation process that needs to be done before their treatment does not get done. Within hours the message had reached some 400 thousand people and we had access to more information to reach the powers that be to get something done. How long would it have taken us to post this in a Newspaper? How much would it have cost us? If the paper chooses to do it for free, the negotiation would have taken more time. When they finally agree, no newspaper in Nigeria reaches the number of people we are able to reach via a Twitter campaign alone. Certainly, no newspaper has the potential to engage this much people as we do online. The reach was worldwide.

Bloggers matter, they count and they are crucial not just for the fledgling democracy we’ve got here but for our society where secrecy and lack of openness have done us more harm than good.

Like bad men and women, there’d be bad Bloggers but we would never be in a position to say kill all men and women because some men and women are bad. Should we then kill all Bloggers? That is exactly the point. These folks are here to stay. Like the reality of the world and its cascade of events that portray a new order, Bloggers are part of that order and we either live together with them or die alone for them to blog about it.

Source: YNaija.com