360DigitalInfluence

We wear a mask that grins and lies
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

- Paul Lawrence Dunbar

It begins when we are children. As Steve Hein of EQI.org points out, “Children start out emotionally honest. They express their true feelings freely and spontaneously. But the training to be emotionally dishonest begins at an early age. The child is told to smile when actually she is sad. She is told to apologize when she feels no regret. She may be told to kiss people good night when she would never do so voluntarily.” In short, she will slowly be influenced to conform to a social structure that attempts to control what feels true.

But what does emotional honesty have to do with WikiLeaks and Digital Influence, you ask?

It’s simple really. We are still struggling – as individuals and as countries - to break down the walls of ‘protection’ that we have been brought up to believe we must build. We have not yet replaced those walls with the bridges necessary to fully transform society.

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One journalist that should be required weekly reading for anyone in the PR and marketing fields is Jon Fine who writes a column for BusinessWeek magazine all about the business of media. During a conference on online communities, Jon and I spoke about several topics, including how journalism is evolving, whether local media will survive, and what advice he might offer to aspiring journalists and PR people about succeeding in this new world. He breaks down some of the myths about the separation of traditional and new media, and offers a great vision of what the journalist of the future might look like: