One Percenter

I just finished reading the book “ProBlogger” written by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. The book is written to help bloggers learn about the profession and determine if blogging is the right direction to pursue with their time. Darren and Chris have successful blogging businesses and they make their living writing, supporting, and commenting on their websites. Problogger is a very good book for anyone thinking about pursuing a blogging career in any fashion. Whether you want to blog part time, for personal use, or to try and make a full time career of it, this book is for you. It is current and well articulated. You will learn a lot about the true time and effort that goes into becoming a successful blogger. As with any new business or project, it can be a long, hard road to success.

That’s about all I have for a book review, it’s a pretty cut and dry subject. If you are interested in blogging, buy it. So what does the topic have to do with this book? Not much really, but there was a statement contained within that I believe can be related to our daily lives. The authors cite a usability study performed by Jakob Nielsen which reports “90% of online community-users are lurkers (read or observe without contributing), with only 9% of users contributing “a little” and 1% actively contributing.” Great, but what does that have to do with life outside of Internet community usage? My theory is this: People are not only actively contributing 1% of their time online, but they are only actively contributing 1% of their time in the real world.

Well that seems like a huge chasm to bridge doesn’t it? Or does it? People live their lives a certain way and along with that, everything they do follows a similar pattern in how they contribute their time. It’s not a long bridge or leap of faith here. People are habitual and if they are inactive in society, they will be inactive in almost everything they are involved in. If a person is very active in life, they will bring their level of enthusiasm to everything they do. This is a case where there isn’t a middle ground as shown by Jakob’s research. 90% of people fail to contribute to the online community. In a normal bell curve, you would expect the percentage to be much closer to middle. But, it’s not. Why? The answer is because people are not actively contributing in their real lives. Each and every one of you can take a quick look around you and think about those you know or even think about yourself and readily see the lack of commitment our society has for active contribution.

Each time an election comes up, everyone talks about voter turnout. It seems that as our country ages, our population is less concerned about how our votes impact our government. We are “happy” with 60% turnout. That is terrible. We should never have less than 90% turnout for a vote affecting our society from the federal all the way down to the local level. Our apathetic society is actively NOT contributing, not just online, but in everyday life. The report above is just a simple illustration of just how far our apathy has infected what we do. So, let’s ease it a bit and include the other 9% of “sometimes” contributors. That gives us a whopping 10% of people who are willing to engage their mind in some sort of discussion. Does that mean that the other 90% already know everything and have nothing to contribute? Of course it doesn’t. We all have something to contribute whether it is physical or mental contribution.

Are you a one percenter? Are you part of the 10%? Or are you part of the 90% who slide by and offer no input to society? I am personally in the 1% of active contributors in most everything I do. I cannot sit idly by and “let” things happen to me. I will admit that in my younger years, I was all about being a part of the 90% lurker community. It is so much easier to hold back and not contribute. Your mind is much less stressed. Everyday life is easier because you know the other 10% will take care of what needs to be done. You can depend on those people worrying about the “greater good.” It comes down to one simple fact. People choose to contribute because it’s necessary. Without active contributors in our world, our society would cease to exist. The efforts of those active contributors are serving more than just the individual. The contributions carry over to the sometime contributors and lurkers in life.

Lurkers are riding piggy back. The contributors of society are of course providing the ride. How can we get more people to move from lurker to contributor? Is there an incentive for switching sides? Yes, there is an incentive, but it’s not monetary. The incentive is in knowing that you can, as an individual, contribute to society and make things better for more than just yourself. If everyone chose to be a contributor, the time and effort of those contributing would actually be less because more people would be shouldering the load. Right now, we have a few carrying many. We could reverse that and have many carrying a few.

The question remains, how can we motivate people to switch their alliance? With no money, promotion, etc as a reward for creating more “work” for yourself, why would you choose to switch sides and make your life more difficult when everything is going ok as it is? The above incentive of self satisfaction is not enough for most otherwise we wouldn’t have 10% contributing to society. There has to be something else to motivate our society. I believe it comes down to something I like to call basic training. When we were young, we were taught right from wrong. We learned about our moral and ethical makeup. We had the innocence of being young. These basic lessons of life are evident in contributors. Somewhere, between being young and being an adult, we have lost our need to contribute. Was it taught to us along the line? Did our environment make it ok to accept being apathetic?

We must return to our roots. Bring back our willingness to step out of the shelter of lurker life and join those who are pushing us forward. Without contribution, we will go nowhere. What happens when the backs break of those our society is living on? What happens when the contributors decide they have had enough? Will there be anyone there to take their place? If we begin living our lives with our basic training in mind, we can all become active contributors to society and our lives will be rewarded in many ways that money cannot buy. Don’t sit on the sidelines anymore. Become part of that 1% and grow it by choosing the engage rather than lurk.