Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.

Crazy Rich Asians & the impact of my work: I helped save an architectural gem in Southeast Asia

Remembering the time when I conceived, pitched, wrote, sold, published a three page story in a top newsweekly magazine out of Hong Kong that highlighted a historical building at risk from nearby development to 93,000 elite members of government, business and the arts.

The article had impact.

The year after the article was published, the building won a newly created UNESCO Heritage Award.

To promote the conservation of the greatest diversity of the region’s built heritage, in the year 2000 UNESCO inaugurated the annual Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, a program designed to respond to the question: “Within the realities of contemporary, fast-track development, what of the built heritage do Asians value and want to preserve from the past to inform the region’s place in the global future?”

• quoted from TheSiamSociety.org Lessons from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation: International Best Practices in Thailand

  Richard Engelhardt, Montira Horayangura Unakul and Julia Davies

In 2018 you saw this historic property in the film Crazy Rich Asians, which used it as a setting.

You know it from Crazy Rich Asians. I championed its story in 1998.

This blows my mind! I was trained in martial arts by the granddaughter of a samurai

Video retrospective of GlobalNiche, my remote skills edtech startup 2011-2013 and beyond...

“Her groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.”

— Tanya Monsef

I founded GlobalNiche in Istanbul with Tara Agacayak after evolving my 2006 cultural book to a 2010 global citizen blog to an online skill building business, and Tanya Monsef joined us when I moved to San Francisco. Here’s what Tanya, the Dean's Executive Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University for the past decade, says about GlobalNiche in 2024.

Watch a quick retrospective, excuse any missing media.

"Anastasia’s groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.

Tanya recalls how I took my knowledge and prior success using book publishing’s “author platform” concept to reach the public with content marketing, branding and community outreach (that’s Expat Harem!), and combined it with the heavily-online techniques a serial expat like me has relied on during my overseas experiences, and then how I created a way to teach it to others, and then to scale it.

"GlobalNiche was a forward-thinking leader in digital solutions and thought leader to a global cohort of founders and business women, as well as organizations serving female innovators.”

This reminds me that Tanya and I continued to deliver talks and workshops well into 2014 and later, working with the Women’s Startup Lab in Mountain View, Turkish Women’s International Network in Menlo Park, and a women executives group at Cisco in San Jose, and I’ve guest lectured to her business students at Santa Clara University for several years.

““Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing an ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity. ”

— Tanya Monsef

"Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing her ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity,” she says.

"GlobalNiche was awarded Top Instructor by Udemy in 2013 as the most enrolled course.” You’ll see in the quick video above that Udemy noted we enrolled students from 17 nations in 2013.

Tanya recalls our 2013 win of an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women by national and international gender equality foundations, global health nonprofits, and academic leadership centers.

The multi-year strategic change initiative of San Jose State University, Public Health Institute (PHI), World Pulse, the Global Women's Leadership Network, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Global Fund for Women recognized GlobalNiche's pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools for connecting and transforming communities world-wide.

“In 2013 GlobalNiche won an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women, recognition of a pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools.”

— Tanya Monsef

ON CONTRIBUTING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK MOVEMENT

In 2014, I looked back on the workforce pioneering I’d done during GlobalNiche, and noted how awareness and adoption was coming for people who hadn’t yet felt the need for this online survival method:

“I’m proud to have added definition to, contributed to & participated in the movement toward every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting and creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone, the incorporation of location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers, a new seriousness around digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking in general for personal and professional development, reinvisioning the future of work with online collaboration and cocreation, the adoption of global communication best practices, the absolute tidal wave of online content marketing, the rise of the transformational consumer.”

Academic review of my anthology highlights gender themes, the hamam stories put people on planes

Now you can listen to KIP's Emerging Narrative...thanks to AI voice generator

Consider this audio a companion to the Bigger Picture video of various quotes I’ve collected rather than a mirror image…there’s more to this multifaceted story.

“A unique curation of emergent voices describing this moment we find ourselves in.”

— KIP

This is my first experiment with AI voice generation using a script made from individual quotes from civic participators I’ve been tracking for last past 7 years, describing this moment we find ourselves in. Quote credits in the images below and a full list to come.

TBT, my Global Niche journey in my TEDU talk pitch for TED GLOBAL 2010

Stumbled on this long ago pitch - to speak at a side event of TED Global conference in Oxford in 2010. To talk about our global self that can be found through online social networking.

I was having a great time with it, and early, as an expatriate! Those sure were golden days of wide open online life and exploration, glad I got to experience them. Nothing like today’s terrordome of trolls and info ops.

Posting this as a Throwback Thursday, to a time when I was thinking about our potential to connect globally (and yet refusing to use a common tongue to do it?! 😅), when in November 2024 my attention has been turning more and more to offline local community.

“We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation. ”

— Me in 2010

A MOST DIFFICULT NO-BRAINER: global citizens still need to find a place in the world

We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation.

A global identity can seem nebulous and ungrounded, while something concrete and localized makes more sense. Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

There’s good news in this era of globalization. I believe we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo, a place where our concrete center won’t hold. Too many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one. 

This 600-word talk is synthesized from ~six months of my blogposts at Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation and includes revelations from my 13 years of identity struggle as an expatriate in 4 countries, the virtual community of cultural peers I created with the book Tales from the Expat Harem and the current online neoculture community expat+HAREM, and my work as a cultural producer and host of the hybrid identity discussion series Dialogue2010,  two years in-depth experience in social media with a focus on location independence and self actualization.

I’ll cover our changing sense of peers, the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of social circumstance -- and how that demands more value and relevance from our connections, and us, and how fashioning a hybrid lifestyle to honor all the worlds we live in taps into our own global being. I call it finding your global niche, a psychic solution to a global identity crisis. 

I end with a metaphor for this kind of fluid identity (bobbing buoy tied to a point deep below surface of changing options, existing in a wider orbit around the inner me so I can be more versions of myself) and extrapolate that to the issue of global citizenship. Putting distance between yourself and your global citizenship offers more fluid points of connection, as well as an anchor. I suggest creating ‘psychic location independence’ to truly be a citizen of the world.