RobNeville.net

The same social dynamic that happens in high school lunch rooms across the US is paralleled in social media.

Maybe you were one of the cool kids. I wasn’t. I was one of the faceless masses. The inane social order of the High School lunch room lives on through the internet. There was the cool kids table. You know what I’m talking about. For whatever reason, there was less than 5% of your school’s population that were revered as demi-gods. Usually, the reasons were not entirely understood - maybe they were football stars. Maybe they came from wealthy families. Maybe they just were good looking and knew it.

You then huddled with some other social group - maybe jocks…maybe the smart kids…maybe the stoners.

Here’s the kicker…most of the people that were in the “cool” crowd were a-holes. Not all of them, but most of them. They could do nothing wrong. Hell, their crap smelled like roses as far as they were concerned. These people were almost never all that smart either (with a few exceptions). In fact, most were C students at best (probably due to the prolific genocide of brain cells that would ensue on the weekends).

Most of the truly interesting people I knew where decidedly NOT in the “in” crowd. Yet, most people didn’t get to know them. They were lost as people clamored for the attention of the lunch room equivalent of Web 2.0 A-Listers. Looking back, I’m thankful that I woke up and stopped giving a rat’s arse what the cool kids did or thought.

The problem is that blogs are a model for the the high school lunch room. There are a-listers that have this entrenched position with everybody trying to break into that crowd. Everybody wants the spotlight on them. Because the a-lister content consistently gets seen, dug, stumbled, reposted, commented simply because it came from an a-lister, everybody else is drowned out as noise. That’s not to say that everything everybody is saying on their blogs deserves your attention, but I can guarantee that there’s high quality, relevant writing happening right now that you’ll never read or hear about.

I’m on a mission. I’m going to start trying to find these voices that I haven’t heard - the long tail of good bloggers. I want to find good bloggers that few people have heard of that deserve to be. I’m going to stop trying to impress or grab the attention of a-listers. I’m going to stop trying to emulate them too. Why? Because looking back, I had better friends in high school than the cool kids did and I had more of them. Who then was truly cool?

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