I’ve read a couple of Social Media blog posts recently that have concerned me. One post talks about Passion as the Defining Success Factor in the 21st century, and some of the implications quite frankly concern me. The point of the post seems to be that to successful, one most have “passion.” Fair enough, but the writer defines workplace passion (to my mind at least) as the willingness to completely subjugate one’s identity, and almost every waking hour, to one’s profession, and by extension, one’s employer.

The writer speaks approvingly of employees voluntarily checking email on the weekend, and at the same time, warns people of the perils of having Facebook and Twitter accounts that dare to show passion and interest in non-work-related activities. The ideal person is someone “who cannot leave their job at the office.”

Another blog entry talks about exploiting the Christmas Holiday slowdown as an opportunity to obtain a competitive advantage over competitors who unwisely decide to partake in traditional holiday activities. Imagine, reaching out to people simply for the sake of being social, instead of business advantage?

These two posts have left me feeling depressed about Social Media. It seems all that is being done is enabling employees to give more and more previously personal time to one’s employer or clients. I am starting to hear less and less talk about work/life balance and more about work/life integration, and employers will love voluntary unpaid overtime as proof of passion, as a way to avoid hiring more than the absolute bare minimum of staff. In this way, I see Social Media as being complicit in the jobless recovery.

Social Media is becoming the workaholic’s wet dream, and like the ghost of Jacob Marley we are encouraged to be willingly fettered by cyber-chains to our working life.

I enjoy my job, and pursue many of the same topics (e.g blogging and podcasting) outside of work hours, but I will never allow myself to be defined by my profession. I have many passions and interests but they are not all work-related, and I do not feel the need to hide them from my online presence.

The old saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” still applies, and talking shop is crushingly dull for those forced to listen, when there are so many possible topics of conversation. I’d rather talk to people with a wide range of interests, not all work related.

While I use many Social Media tools, I will not let them enslave me. Resistance is not futile, and I will not be assimilated!

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This week, a fascinating discussion with Dr. Alice Cooley about privacy and romance in the middle ages. A different time, with different attitudes!

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This week’s Music:

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My teenage daughter is just starting the Photography unit of the art course she is taking in grade 10. I was asking her about it last night, and heard a couple of things I really liked. The class will start off with the students making and using pinhole cameras. Secondly, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the students will be taught traditional darkroom techniques.

I switched over completely to digital about five years ago, but I learned traditional darkroom techniques in the 1970’s, at the age my daughter is now, and even though it’s been been years since I’ve seen the inside of a darkroom, I feel that learning darkroom skills influences my digital photography, and I’m happy to have had the chance to learn those skills.

For my daughter (and the other students in her class), even though eventually most of the work will be done digitally, being exposed to the “old school” craft will provide a deeper understanding of the art of photography, and hopefully encourage the development of a slower, more thoughtful eye.

Kudos to her teacher!

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One of the more unusual Twitter accounts I follow is lowflyingrocks. This account, set up by Tom Taylor,  tweets every time when non-tiny objects pass within 0.2 astronomical units (about 18.6 million miles or 31 million kilometers) of Earth.  The twitter account gets information from a NASA database for this purpose.

Many of these objects could do some damage if they were strike Earth, so every time I see a tweet saying an object has missed us, I realize that no matter how bad the day has been, it could have been much worse

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This week, I speak with Peter Muller of PRT Consulting about Personal Rapid Transit, an approach to solving some of the issues around traditional public transit that have hindered its more widespread acceptance.

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This week’s music

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It is difficult today to understand how revolutionary VisiCalc was when it came on the scene in 1979. As the first spreadsheet application, it empowered users in organizations and businesses to do their own financial analyses, and freed them from the tyranny of the mainframe data centres of the day. Before the spreadsheet, for a lot of computational work, programs were run in batch mode, as opposed to being run in real time. A user would get in contact with Central I.S., adopt an appropriately deferential attitude, and meekly ask the stern analyst in the white lab coat behind the glass doors to run the job.

If you were lucky, and hadn’t pissed off the analyst recently (causing him to “forget” to schedule your job), the next day a large printout would be on your desk for you to dig through. Business at the speed of thought? Hardly. With the advent of Visicalc, you could get your numbers when you wanted, and insult I.T. nerds at your leisure, in safety.

No wonder the PC was resisted by traditional IT staff for so long; with the loss of control that applications like VisiCalc represented, the power of the I.T. staff was neutralized, and like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

It’s sadly ironic that three decades later, the battle for control is being fought again, but the the role of the traditional IT department is now filled by companies such as Apple, the people who were the rebels thirty years ago. The battlefield has shifted from the data centre to the mobile device; Apple’s capricious, murky, and inconsistent App Store application approval process is seen as a heavy handed attempt by Apple to maintain dominance, even as prominent developers publicly abandon iPhone development efforts. The term “jailbreaking” for installing software allowing the user to install whatever they want on the iPhone is most app.

Apple is not alone in its desire for control. The recently released Google Chrome OS seems to be designed to push the users towards Google-controlled services, and away from running the apps they wish to run, and storing the data where they wish to store it. The Cloud is being shaped into a tool for giving the public freedom from choice. And who knows what Microsoft has in mind for Azure.

Throw in a soupcon of DRM, erode fair use, patent everything in sight, and whip up some security fears, and the three decades of relative computer freedom we have enjoyed could be just an anomaly.

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OK, first I guess I should apologize for the title, but it’s what came to mind.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that most social media content on the web is not created to be “great art,” meant to delight and inspire the generations to follow. Whether we are talking about tweets, Youtube videos of kids lip-syncing to popular music, etc. this content is meant to be ephemeral, and that’s OK. Most of what humanity has created over the centuries has been ephemeral.

At the same time though, in the midst of centuries full of forgotten scrawls, there was always respect for and the valuation of work that stood apart, in scope, vision, and the effort required to create them. In addition, many of these great works require an effort to truly experience and understand them. (Try reading Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce sometime).  So when I saw this as part of a comment in response to Chris Brogan’s “Content Is Not King” post, I nearly choked.

“If you can easily write 3 blog posts a day and not break a sweat then you have your voice. If it takes you a week to research and write a post then you are not writing about something that you are passionate about.”

Sorry, but if you are writing three posts a day without breaking a sweat, then you are sitting on your laurels and mailing it in. Sweat is part of the creative process, effort, indeed struggle is part of the creative process, pushing beyond your boundaries is part of the creative process, for content that matters. It’s the difference between art and craftsmanship. Offhand utterances are ephemeral by their very nature, and I am concerned when I see ephemerality (if that’s a word) implicitly praised in this fashion.

Many people don’t like PowerPoint because it tends to force the content, and even the thought process behind the content into a confined and limited space. Bullet points don’t allow a lot of space for reflection or detail, let alone subtlety. I fear that in a similar manner the quick and offhand way of creating content that is intrinsic to the Social Media space is getting trumpeted as a virtue; it’s OK for everything to be slapdash, sloppy and instant, as long as you’re plugged in now.

If as a result of embracing Social Media we get hung up on “now”, refuse to read longer blog posts  (let alone books), get addicted to speedy content creation and consumption,  then all that Social Media is doing is turning a demand for instant gratification into a virtue, and creating a cyberspace equivalent of Attention Deficit Disorder.

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So, you’ve gone into the C-Suite and wowed the assorted suits on how Social Media can transform an organization, both externally( in terms of how it communicates with its customers and stakeholders), and internally (in terms of how Social Media principles and practices will change how staff work and communicate with each other).

Feeling psyched, energized, optimistic that success is inevitable? Well don’t be too sure.

There was one project stakeholder who likely wasn’t in the boardroom for the discussion, and that stakeholder was the staff of the organization. These people, normally time-challenged and stressed in these tough times, will be skeptical and may feel threatened. Their first response may be “Where will I find the time to do all this extra work??” Inwardly, many will ask themselves, how is this different from the last management fad we were subjected to when the CEO went to a conference or seminar? In short, an organization’s employees need to be sold on social media, just like the management of the organization.

Now some may say, employees need to adapt and change to the new way of doing business, or seek employment elsewhere! While the concept of a “malcontentectomy” to get rid of resisters may seem appealing, I don’t think this is the response that will work. While the noisiest “malcontents’ may be easy to spot, there will likely be a group of quiet veterans who have been through Total Quality Management and various other management fads over the years, and have learned to pay lip service to new ideas while at the same time minimizing the impact on their day to day work life, keeping their heads down and waiting for the CEO to be distracted by the next shiny new executive toy.

Social Media in the workplace is a philosophy and culture more than than it is a technology or a set of policies, and as such cannot be parachuted into an organization from above unless you find ways to encourage it to grow organically from below. (And the “Do it or I’ll fire your ass!” approach won’t work here). You need to let your C-Suite customers know how important it will be to get staff buy-in, and to find ways that will make social media positive and meaningful for the staff. If this doesn’t happen, the gleaming new staff community site  you build today could well be a ghost town in a few months.

Someone needs to ask the C-Suite executives how they feel social media will affect their jobs. If they feel nothing much will change for them, do you think they will treat the introduction of social media in the organization any differently than the parents who take their newborn to church to get baptized, and then are never seen in church again?

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This week, I talk with Valerie Hunter, a veteran of both radio and podcasting about the changes in radio over the course of her career, and the future of radio, if it indeed has one.

Valerie’s Podcasts:

Movies for the Blind

Valerie in TO

No Mood Swing

Direct link to episode

This week’s music

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In a recent blog post, Chris Brogan takes issue with the concept of “Content is King.” He suggests we should “work hard on content, but focus on relationships“, and while the ultimate goal of enhancing connects between people is a noble one, I see this interpretation as a broad brush approach that does a lot of content a disservice.

Throughout recorded history, many creations by artists, writers, musicians and philosophers and others were definitely not seen as relationship building when first released to the world. Though now recognized as masterpieces, and works that resonate through our cultures today, when first created, these works were seen as shocking, threatening and antagonistic by many in society. Think of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the door of a church. The first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, leading to fistfights and rioting in the audience. The philosophy of Socrates, who lived what he believed, and ultimately paid with his life.

These (and many others) are examples not of creativity driving polite conversations and relationships, but of people using their creations to shout in anger, to point out, mock, and confront conventional thinking. The typical response was being ignored, marginalized or attacked, not the building of a large loyal audience at the time. By contrast, many of the contemporaries of these revolutionary thinkers made comfortable careers out playing the game, working their networks, creating safe, comfortable, non-challenging and ultimately forgettable content, or perhaps more accurately, product. As a result, they are mere historical footnotes, stub articles in Wikipedia. They made themselves irrelevant by regurgitating truisms and trite conventionalities.

I fear in many cases that much of the Social Media space is sliding into this sterile frame of mind. If content is always written from a relationship point of view, the logical consequence is to fall into the trap of creating what we think people want to hear, even unconsciously. We spend too much time congratulating each other for agreeing with each other. As much as we think we are being new and different, we risk becoming merely a cadre of conventionality.

One of the comments on Chris’ post I found especially disturbing:

“you can have great content but if people don’t connect with you and build that relationship then your content means nothing.”

If we use this simplistic metric, so much of the great creations of our civilization would need to be written off. For the truly inspired thinkers, their creations would not change regardless of whether they thought it would bring friends, fame and fortune, or would cost them every friend and possession they had. For them, the most important relationship was with truth as they saw it; the only audience that mattered was their creative conscience, not the temporal equivalent of how many retweets they got over a five minute span.

While I don’t believe in shock for shock’s sake, if one doesn’t get strong negative reactions on occasion, I’d be worried.

The price of progress, the fare of growth is struggle and argument. We grapple or we simper.

Go ahead; poke the bear.

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