The Sea of Uniqueness - Thoughts On Guest Speaker Erik Hanberg

Our guest speaker on Monday the 24th spoke about his experiences with self publication and it got me thinking about using technology to publish yourself or your products. How does technology affect publication? Publicity? Advertisement? Does it help you or your product become more noticeable than others? What if the "others" all do the same? Is your product still more noticeable, or was it just placed in another sea of others? It's almost undeniable that technology and perhaps even just the internet itself can give you a huge advantage in advertisement and publicity for a book, a movie, or whatever it may be. The thing is, the effectiveness seems to decrease as a platform, such as the internet or maybe a website, grows larger. I would argue the most ideal way to publish something is by putting it on a growing platform, where that something is unique to anything else on that platform. In other words, you want to find the sweet spot where a platform is large enough that a lot of people will see it, giving you better results, but not so big that your product goes unnoticed along with many others. Unfortunately, a platform like this is rare, hard to find, and hard to predict. There's not much we can really do besides spread our advertisements everywhere we can and hope it takes off. That's why we jump on new inventions like the internet, always eager to try and get the snowball rolling. Even if you think you have something unique, if you throw it into the sea of uniqueness, is it really unique after all? Did that even make sense?