The great story and the cat fight
When Andrew and I framed the concept of We Media back in 2002, we adopted a phrase that was intentionally ambiguous. Our intent was to inform and to be informed by a societal movement around media that respected and impacted everyone. It didn’t matter if you worked in offices, owned presses and managed big businesses that employed thousands. Or worked at home, owned a laptop, and wanted to connect with a few friends. The idea of We Media was then, and is now, to be better at communicating with one another, relating to one another, learning from one another, building business together, and making life more understandable, if not better.
We conceived We Media as the story of our time; a fable about a sea of stories in a place where everyone can be a storyteller and everyone can collaborate. 
The vision may be idealistic, but at least it’s not cynical. Characters motivated by greed or power, ego or influence, are now attempting to co-opt it as they bicker over why they’re right about something or the other.
The current chapter is a soap opera whose principal players are the philandering boss and the jilted lover. The affair has been costly for the philanderer. He believes he’s being treated unfairly and pledges to return to old ways. The lover has found new meaning in life. She’s seeking respect after discovering that independence can be liberating. Everyone’s buzzing about the estranged, celebrity couple. The conversation has all the juice of a public palimony suit. The philanderer and the lover now turn to friends in high places for the love, support and validation that will influence the outcome.
I suppose we were naive to expect the better angels of our nature to prevail. The current conversation is about the money and who’s getting it. On this we are neither naive nor cynical. We understand the stakes and have built our business around advising clients where to put them.
But we still have faith in better angels. The vision still soars. We see emerging forms of digital storytelling that lift the spirit, stir the soul, and drive the imagination. They are searchable, referential and portable. You can talk back to them, link them to other relevant stories, read them as lightly or as deeply as you want, share them with friends, author your own chapter, or exercise your brain in conversation about them.
They integrate text, pictures, and video. They apply creative, new metaphors for storytelling beyond the traditions of who-what-when-where-and-why, inverted pyramids and anecdotal narratives. They can transport you by context, locale, culture or the point of view of an individual character. They can be read at the cadence of your heartbeat as it reacts to the human emotions of exhilaration, tension, tenderness, sadness, fear and triumph.
It seems only right that the people creating this story ought to be rewarded for their talents. We Media is not only profitable, but profits all. Who wouldn’t want to embrace it? It was meant to change perspectives and inspire a better world. Each of us is at the core of its story. It should be the signature of an enlightened time.
That’s the conversation we ought to be having. Instead we’re having a cat fight.
Just one thread: Find some topcats and links to the fight here: /
