Find Your Voice!

Over the next couple of months, the Blueprint will be running a series entitled, “Find You Voice.” In this series, we will be discussing many of the principles that brought us together and led to the formation of this site. The series, running every other Friday, will explore the past present and future of blogging and how to find your place within it. This is the first piece. Please enjoy:

Blogopolis is a world brimming with a billion posts and comments; a place where we can plant our flag and build the value of our property without ever leaving our chair. A land thriving on communication and community, where participation is paramount.

Blogs come in every sort, expressing opinions to every willing pair of eyes. Grouped together in niches, these various platforms live dual lives. Blogopolis is filled with bloggers helping fellow bloggers, as they themselves are climbing for the top, rung by hard earned rung. Opportunity abounds for those with the proper toolbox, and though drive and determination are essential, they are only part of the equation.

Blogopolis is indeed a wonderful place. Making friends and spreading thought has never been easier or more effective.

Our future is now.

How did we arrive at this current intersection between communication and technology? Who is responsible for this unique, complex, and elegant system?  When did blogging begin, where does it come from, and what winding roads did it wander to end up here? Prior to the Renaissance, communication was a luxury. In the West, the church held dominion over the flow of information, and this is how it remained for several hundred years until early in the sixteenth century when Martin Luther pounded his 95 Theses through the front door of the church.

Luther challenged the establishment, in effect saying the rules were no longer written only by them. Luther’s revolution however, would have likely died immediate death had it not been for another equally profound development a few decades prior.

Johanas Gutenberg, a German goldsmith and printer, first dreamed and then developed movable type; an innovation that altered the landscape of communication forever. Movable type meant books were no longer imprisoned by the sluggish speed of human hand. With the advent of movable type, books were able to be printed in a primitive version of a process still in use today. This new procedure meant the papacy no longer held a monopoly on information. Bibles were for everyone.

Access led to literacy, literacy to questions, questions to answers, and finally, answers to the Renaissance.

This is where we find ourselves again, hinged on the precipice of our next great awakening.  That dawn is here, and it is bloggers who are most likely to push the sunrise further and faster than any other tribe.

The dawn of the information age.

The Internet is the largest organism yet made by Man. Its fingers graze every continent on Earth, yet can be accessed in its entirety from an iPhone (a device which in itself is a marvel; the first legitimate PC in a pocket). Amazingly flexible, the Internet is as big as we want, yet as small as we need it to be. In its infancy, the Web was no more than an efficient way for universities to share information.  Hobbyists employed it to play games with other like-minded geeks across the globe.  In its dawn (the 70’s and 80’s), the Net was far from mainstream.  It wasn’t until the early to mid 90’s that circulation of the Internet spread to most of the planet.  The Model T- like milestone of a computer in every household cleared the road for the rest of the world to way for the masses to dial in.

As we marched into a new millennium, the World Wide Web quickly took its place alongside previous technological revolutions such as electricity, telephone, and television. Almost all of us were aware of (and had access to) this bold new technology.

There was no doubt we stood at the edge of a new age.

Never before have we held more power as a people; never has the world been so connected.  It is difficult to argue against the idea that we are now one vast global district.  The internet has rendered futuristic theory into any minute reality.  Now anyone with a phone jack may gather that which makes them unique, and send it in a signal to every spot on the map, sometimes mere seconds from conception.

The class of 2009, has little memory of life before the web. These are tomorrow’s leaders. Collectively, they and all behind them will lend voice to our global future.  It is they who will take what we are building and shape it into something we can not yet fathom.

The Blueprint Team

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