Scott Porad

Micah Baldwin writes a brilliant essay where he states, “We are the Blog Poets; the Blogniks.” His essay expresses perfectly description of how I’ve been feeling lately, but have been unable to put into words until now.

At the end of his post, Micah quotes one of my favorite passages from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. A passage that I will re-quote here:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

At once, this expresses the bursting enthusiasm of the Beats, illustrates the eloquence and magic of Kerouac’s masterpiece, and hits the nail on the head so directly that my head nearly split open and melted with excitement!

For the last several months I have been completely inspired by the work that I am doing with I Can Has Cheezburger? More inspired, honestly, than I’ve felt about work for many, many years.

Through ICHC I have am seeing the revolutionary changes happening in the media business. I have been learning about it, and meeting people (like Micah) and talking about it, and spending a lot of my free time absorbed with attempting to digest just what’s going on.

The key point is this: The Media Business is a ginormous and powerful beast which means that for it to be threatened by revolution means that some equally and extremely powerful forces are at work.

What are these forces? The Internet—ever expanding broadband networks and continually improving technology for delivering content—that’s what. To anybody paying even a modest amount of attention, it is obvious that the Internet is disrupting the economics of the media business in a major, major way. The industry is going to change and there will be new winners and losers.

But—and the “but” is what makes it so exciting—is that it’s not clear how it’s going to shake out. Thinking about how it’s all going end up has had me in a grip lately. There are so many ways it could happen and nobody knows. Nobody. (In fact, the people who say they know are the ones who know the least!)

I am fascinated by learning and trying to understand the dynamics of what is going on. It’s literally like having a front row seat as motor coach operators flush out the buggy whip manufacturers, as the riders approach the watchtower while the princes keep the view…it’s awesome!

What’s especially wonderful is that what’s happening with media gives me the same feeling I had when I was first involved with the Internet back in 1994-1995. A feeling of knowing that I was part of a force that was larger than me or any one person; a force that was changing the world permanently and like nothing before. (Well, on that point, perhaps since movable type or, at least, television.)

That was an incredibly special time. Back then the “World Wide Web” hadn’t established its dominance. Services like AOL, Compuserve, MSN and AT&T Interchange were battling for “cyberspace”. The whole notion of an INTERconnetedNETwork was novel and new and nobody quite understood exactly what it would mean.

Yet everybody was just trying everything and anything, new ideas, and crazy ideas. And talking and pontificating and discussing and exploring. It was all new and nobody had a freaking clue how it was going to work out.

This, as Micah says, is exactly how Jack Kerouac and the other Beats felt in their time and probably why On the Road, as a novel, has resonated so deeply with me ever since I received it as a birthday gift when I was 19.