[p2p-research] A P2P Foundation milestone: breaking through to the mass media

[Michel Bauwens]

a reflection after my trips to athens and barcelona:



When you take up a advocacy task like the P2P Foundation, which requires an
investment of time and effort, it is obviously to influence to some degree
or other the state of affairs in the world. Permanently swimming against the
stream without any progress would be disheartening.

In measuring the influence of our work, there is of course what the online
world tells you.  We can’t really complain about our achievements since
2006. Our wiki stats page mention over 10 million pageviews, and the
Twitter-oriented Topsy tells us we are a top 2% global influencer in terms
of number of retweets and secondary audience. Nevertheless, reaching the
online world is important and essential, but mass media are still
influential amongst huge audiences which cannot be reached through
specialized internet media.

Until this month, this type of coverage is something that eluded us almost
completely. We would have lectures in many places, but for specialized
audiences and without any mass media echo. This seems to have changed in the
months of March-April 2010. Once could be a fluke, but perhaps two times is
not. In Greece, where we were early March, an interview with the major
conservative newspaper, was coupled with a video interview in front of the
Acropolis, and two political meetings. However, these last two days in
Barcelona certainly topple that. Two TV interviews were coupled with four
interviews for print media, such as for El Pais and Publico.

I would not like to raise any expectations that this would become the rule,
but nevertheless, I think we have gotten through the glass ceiling, and I
consider this an important advance for the influence of our ideas.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
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