This
small book by Seth Godin is something you read through in an afternoon.
It is less than 100 pages and made up of small, often only one paragraph
size bits. As Seth suggests himself in this book, it might be easier
to loan the book from a friend instead of buying it.
However, in this short work Seth manages to shake your world. That
is maybe a bit exaggerated, but what he actually says is that we are
at a turning point in history, “the most important revolution of our
time” as he calls it.
He
describes how mass-production and mass-marketing; the one-size fits
all culture that dominated our society for decades is disappearing
and being replaced by mini-communities of people dedicated to their
hobbies and passions: “the weird”. Being weird, according to Seth,
is not complying with what the majority of society considers normal.
However, it turns out that nowadays there are more “weird people”
than “normal” ones. He shows this with a Gaussian curve, where the
centre of the bell contains about 80% of the population: the normal
people, with 10% to the left and 10% to the right being abnormal.
However, over the last few years this curve has been flattened.
More and more people started to make “abnormal” choices; choices
that were made by small groups only. For example, instead of eating
white bread, some people chose to eat rye bread and others even
chose a “weird” kind like sunflower seed bread. Thus more and more
people moved from the centre of the curve, the “normal” population,
to the sides. They became weird.
This
weirdness mainly became possible because of the Internet and social
media. People with weird hobbies no longer depend on the people
in their town or region, but can find like-minded people everywhere
in the world. Through social media the consumer has been empowered
and now demands services and products of choice, instead of being
offered only one product, the product all “normal” people buy. It
also enables small businesses with weird products to reach a larger
amount of customers and thus the production and sale of weird products.
Having
read this book I realized I am actually rather weird, and am happy
to say so.
|
Social
media
