Purpose of the blog - feedback plz
Right well, before I make this my official statement of purpose about the blog, I'd like to get some feedback from you guys. Most of what is said here has been hinted at in numerous posts throughout the year and a half this been going. Nothing is completely new here, the basic idea was the philosophy behind why I started the blog and why I chose to write it in the style that I chose to write it.
I've waited this long to expound on it in full and at length because I wanted to wait until I had the perfect articulation of it. Never did I imagine that the very kinds of frustrations it was meant to ward off would sneak their devilish heads into my life before I wrote this. Most of the rationale behind taking the blog down so long was so that I could give it some time and word what I want to say in precisely the right way. But it was taking a long time to come so I put the blog back up and make it priority #1 to figure it out, a task that I completed late last night. 2am, brushing my teeth, it all kind of came together. So here it is, my draft.
Lemme just explain how this essay below will be used. Basically, this blog acts as the "professional face" of me on the internet. Not only am I proud of it, but it is something I wish for potential future employers/creative partners/friends/evaluators (as in, for instance, people looking to hand out scholarships) to see and ... perhaps not admire it, but something they can appreciate correctly. So when I link back to this on resumes or application forms or whatever, instead of linking directly to the blog, I'll give them a link to a splash page, where I ask that they read this fully before clicking a button to be linked to my actual blog. Kind of like the Age Verification pages on porn sites.
I will also put up an edited version of it for normal linkage from the blog, so if people happen upon the blog without me linking them to the right place, then there is an opportunity for them to read it as well. Of course I can't ensure EVERYONE's first visit here is on that page, but I've got to try, right?
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Title: "Read this before proceeding"
To Whom It May Concern:
If you have come looking for the blog of Shanan Kan, then you've come to the right place. Of you I would like to ask a boon: To read through the following essay in its entirety before proceeding to the actual blog. If you are reading this right now, then it is because I have given you a special link, a link which I give out only to people who are looking to potentially hire me or perhaps award me a scholarship or basically looking to find out more information about me from looking at the blog. And if your primary interest is in learning a bit more about me then reading this in its entirety will afford you the best possible chance of appreciating me with the appropriate perspective. I apologise for the excessive length for this, but if you are going to wish to read my blog then you will have to acquaint yourself with my logorrheic nature.
Right from its inception in June 2008, I had a very specific philosophy as to the purpose and feel of the blog, I knew the scope of the things I would feel free to discuss and the manner in which I discussed them. This philosophy was fuelled by how I believed society and the fundamental tenets of our experience had changed, particularly under the influence of Twitter, leading to what I believe to be the death of professionalism; that there is no such thing as a "professional image" and a different mode of interaction and being has usurped this outview which had dominated business practice for the past century and particularly exponentiated with the advent of the internet.
One of my major personal beliefs is that you live your life as if it were in the world that ought. This means, of course, that when I write this blog I am writing from a frame of mind where I believe I exist outside of the professional-unprofessional binary paradigm. Throughout history there have been individuals living their lives as if the qualitative shift in experience was universal. Over time these people may have been thought ludicrous or onto the wrong thing entirely, whilst others have helped usher in and accommodated the masses to this change. That's social Darwinism at it's finest. But the point is that someone has to do it.
Unfortunately, when dealing with people from archaic industries locked into one perspective and blind to any and all qualitative shifts. Businesses have collapsed based on this blindness and it is only too evident in our age, an age where changes to the landscape happen at an accelerating rate. A blog, such as this one, where the author oftentimes expresses controversial views, is hyperbolic in rhetoric, uses frequently ambiguous phrasing, sometimes makes an inappropriate joke, has a sharp tongue and a sometimes sly sarcasm, and perhaps above all has a love of language from its empyreal orotundity to its "uneducated palette", that is, expletives, is putting itself out there to be sniped by these anachronous individuals. They are unable to comprehend anyone who would want such an "unprofessional" blog as their professional face, to them this is something shameful and to be hidden and the only situation in which its contents are made public are by some journalist trying to end the career of its author.
This cognitive schism really harkens back to one of my favourite quotes from the inimitable Oscar Wilde, "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." If you choose to live by the sunlight you see then you will be mocked from those in the shadows.
Though I have always known such people to exist who will so wilfully misrepresent this blog and what it stands for, this was made grimly salient to me when I was accused of harbouring malice and hatred for a community of people that I mentioned here. In actual fact I had mentioned quite extensively how much unending adoration I had for the community and its members and how much it has shaped me to be the person I am today. This person who claimed this wasn't even a member of the community, though when reported to leaders in this group I was ousted and made to be a villain, they explicitly made the claim that this blog was like some secret diary that now everyone knew, when I had spent months ensuring it was on the first results page when you Googled my name.
At any rate, I extirpated my presence from that situation and group. The only real losers of that incident were the members of that community, for I was a positive and consequential influence over its members. Though they all remain my good friends, I am saddened that such a misunderstanding took place. In fact, when I told some of the individuals the circumstance in which I left they started to cry.
From this it became clear that I had to do all in my power to maintain the integrity of the project of this blog whilst ensuring my utmost to prevent such a situation like that from developing again. Hence this essay and my hope that anyone wishing to use my blog as a means of getting to know me to have read it fully. People who already know me will understand and contextualise the blog; those who don't run the risk of egregious miscomprehension.
I've maintained for some time that I've held this philosophy, that my ultimate goal with this blog had always been indifferent to the professional/unprofessional paradigm, since its birth. Perhaps you may think that this is me trying to spin things, that I was caught with my pants down and this is all some ludicrous excuse. And if you think this already then there's nothing I can do to convince you otherwise - you have an inherent bias against me. I can assure you that I have little to no interest in working for individuals who wilfully distort reality to suit their own blindspots, so you may as well stop reading now and leave.
The truth about why I've never fully explicated all this before (though I have hinted at numerous times) is because I had yet to fully articulate precisely what my views were. And for an essay whose purpose was to dispel the ambiguities, I had to be certain with what I wanted to say. It is unfortunate that such an incident is what was the spark for this letter, but I realise now it is necessary.
If you are still reading thus far, haven't been too bored or put off, then I will ask you to keep reading. This entire essay serves two purposes, number one is to properly introduce you to me and the way I write so you appreciate my blog appropriately, and number two it serves as a means to display what I believe to be some philosophical insights as well as the articulation and rhetoric with which I express it. This can only earn more brownie points towards whatever you are evaluating me for. The latter half of this essay explains some of the claims I made in the first section, most prominently notion that the fundemental way we experience the world has changed with services like Twitter and the death of professionalism.
It may be considered a bold claim Twitter could have such a universal affect. Afterall a large number of people still mock the idea of Twitter, they scoff at its users and ask, "What's the point?" I've said it many times before (though you wouldn't possibly know as you've yet to read my blog) that this is an inappropriate question to ask when it comes to Twitter. It is the same kind of inappropriateness that I believe the charge of "this is unprofessional" against this blog is.
It is the exact same inappropriateness Walter Benjamin describes in his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, when he notes how when looking at a photograph, it is absurd to ask "Can I see the original?" There is no "original" of a photograph, they are all exactly the same. One can only imagine what he would have said about contemporary technology, the age of digital reproduction, where you can literally make thousands of copies of the same digital image in seconds, or to delete them without a single concern.
The best hallmark that there has been a breakway in thinking is when a technological development occurs where one of the guiding tenets of philosophy before it is rendered void. So for the age of technical reproduction, when there was only a singular original painting/sculpture/object and potential forgeries, this concept of originality became irrelevant in the face of the photograph. There were people who spoke out against Benjamin, who didn't see the gamechanging principles of the photograph, who were blind to how the art world was fundamentally shifted. But look at society now, we took the notion and ran with it, exhiling originality even more in our digital age.
I propose that the same kind of process has occured with Twitter's introduction. There is no utilitarian "point" to Twitter, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing because Twitter has never aimed to be pointful. Indeed, I would argue that the shift Twitter gives us isn't a move forward: It's a move back.
Think of your real world interactions, when you go on a lunchbreak with a co-worker, for instance. Think of how you're dressed .... What is the point of having worn the red argyle socks today? What is the point of the story you're telling right now? What is the point of you having sat on the left? What is the point of you crossing your legs? What is the point of your index finger to be spaced from the other fingers slightly more than the rest of them?
These questions are all ludicrous and unanswerable. Our real world interactions with other people are not bogged down by these Draconian demands of having meaning. There's no reason to why I crossed my legs at lunch today, I just did. Humans do not naturally have business, goal-orienteded interactions, despite how hard we try.
This harks back to something Stephen Fry said recently at the 140 Conference in London, 2009. To paraphrase, his insight was all in the name of the service: It is Twitter. It isn't ContentBroadcaster or GetFeedback or any other banal, functional and rational description. It a service that is designed to let it's users "babble inconsequentially." It's not made for businesses, it's not made to make money (there's a reason Twitter has yet to earn a single dollar in revenue), it's not made for politicians or celebrities. That's not to say that these people can't use Twitter, they can and they do, but it's important to note that's not why it was created.
Twitter was made by people for people.
If you use Twitter, and you "get it", then you realise that you form emotional relationships with these people. That's not to say you form deep and meaningful ones, but what you do form is a basic human relationship, one that isn't driven by function or benefits or money or purpose.
(I keep saying Twitter as if Twitter completely pioneered this fundamental shift, but that is a little misleading. Inklings of the notion, the yearning to go back to a human, emotional relationship between users on the internet really can first be seen in the Web2.0 or social media. Twitter is just the widest and most mainstream and fully embodies this philosophy.)
One need only look at the services of the past to really realise how much of a stark change this is. Less than 10 years ago, the web could be split into two categories, the authorities who created sources of information and the people who consumed it. Slowly this morphed into everyone by and large being some kind of content producer, either by comic, or indeed writing blogs, making videos, editing Wikipedia. Look at the websites of the professionals; celebrities and politicians all had websites with an entire staff of people dedicated to its maintenance and content producing. People who ran personal websites basically had to think 2, 3, or 6 times before posting anything onto the internet.
But this kind of thinking wasn't limited to just the internet. Even further back, celebrities had no way of handling the media. The newspapers and tabloids were the authority. Once a story broke about you, there was very little you could do to rectify the situation.
This is where my entire point of the death of professionalism is rooted. Somewhere in our history, probably during the first newspapers, people who were talked about by these journalists had to keep a professional or public image. This is an entity that is dicvorced from the person themselves. It didn't matter what difference between the image and the actual person was. One great example is of the concept of closeted homosexuals working in Hollywood, who had to keep their private lives totally and completely secret to protect this image. People came to know and adore this image.
Over time this concept of the image or brand or professional face grew further and further apart from the actual person. This kind of thinking carried over into the development of the internet and modern business practices. If someone is outed for immoral behaviour, there is this expectation that they either resign or their company dismiss them, else they tarnish the image of the company.
Along comes the internet then, and suddenly people didn't have to be a celebrity to have a professional image. Anyone and everyone, as they got more and more tools to be content producers on the internet, had to start watching the things they said and how they said it. It's become common practice for business to Google potential employees and see what footprint they have left.
This is all in the name of professionalism, to protect the image you create as that is what customers come to know. This is the guiding principle of business practice and the internet, that there is You, the person, and you the image and You should never leak into you.
Earlier I rather at length described how Twitter was different from traditional communicative tools, for it connect people at an emotional, at a human level. What does this mean for the existing dichotomy between the individual and their public image? Connecting in this human way bypasses directly the entire concept of the public image.
This brand that you once created was a separate entity entirely, a specious ghost of a person. As such, one could argue that in forming this image is the sum of its parts. So if you look at all the tweets and blog posts of an individual, with enough expletives or controversial views or offensive jokes, that image becomes less and less sterling.
But if you connect with someone at an emotional level, you are connecting with them as a person. Humans are, I have long argued, beings with infinite capacity. They are, to take the Gestaltian approach, greater than the sum of their parts. It is the classic problem of the philosophical zombie - if you took a zombie, made it look exactly like you and to have all the memories of you, would you say that that person had sentient thought? Would you say that they were you? Of course not. They lack that essential quidditas that makes you who you are. This missing component is indefinable for it lacks any grounding in science or rational thought, its place is in the realm of the emotional which isn't, and with any hope never will be explainable.
Therefore, whilst one can take the approach of definitively concluding a causal relation between the parts (Tweets, blog posts etc) and the professional image, there is not such concision relation with the person. The former is a fully rational, business and goal-oriented activity. The latter is fundamentally about making an evaluation about a person, so it would work in the same way you make evaluations about who is or isn't your friend: It becomes an emotional, human activity.
The death of professionalism, it can then be said, is the claim that because Twitter connects people at an emotional level, it completely skips the public image or brand. One is absolved of their dependence of monitoring their posts with the stringent level of paranoia that was once necessary.
Ergo, in conclusion, I argue that this blog follows on from the lead of Twitter. The entire paradigm of professionalism, like pointedness, is not the concern for Twitter as well as blogs any longer. This is the perspective from which I write this blog and my posts. I am connecting to my readers, who may be good friends of mine or total strangers, at an emotional, human level. That is why I am so open, that is why I feel free to discuss the things I do. I do not expect people to read a single post, or a single paragraph, or a single line, or a single word and claim that my professional reputation is tarnished without taking it all into context. (I do not expect people to read the blog in its entirety, which would be an absurd demand, but people to not treat every statement as contributing to my professional image, an entity that the blog is trying very hard to bypass completely.)
It was never my intention of insisting that people necessarily agree with my views and opinions on how this blog is unanswerable to questions of professionalism or how Twitter has fundamentally shifted our basic understandings of business practice. It most certainly could be the case that having after read this entire essay, you go on to read entries in my blog and begin to abhor me or feel that my addition to your business (or recipient of your scholarship) may tarnish your professional image. And I certainly would not begrudge you that. However, the important thing is that you will have read this letter and you will have some modicum of understanding, though perhaps not sharing, of my philosophical outview.
But I would much prefer that you decide not to hire me or award me for the right reasons, rather than having jumped straight into my blog and formed a whole array of ignorant assumptions. That is the purpose of this essay and I can only express gratitude and sympathy for you for having read all this.
Below are two choices, either you decide to jump into the deep and wade the mangrove of my blog, or you may leave. Either way, I trust you are making an informed decision.
Regards,
Shanan Kan
or
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Phew, that was a lot to get off my chest and mind. Glad I've finally articulated it. Perhaps Mother can stop hassling me and my language on this blog :D
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