In working with digital media today training has been replaced by use (e.g. ‘lifelong education’). There is no time to train and for this reason media must be integrated into daily life: In relation to the digital proliferation, ‘Professional Lifecasting’ is applicable to the situation created by social media today, Lifecasting is “a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology” (Wikipedia). In Lifecasting, digital media, and particularly social media, become the means of interacting with your surroundings and experiences. The constant mediation that results from Lifecasting breaks up participation into an almost reflective exercise. In an economy where knowledge is produced and shared online, for academics tensions emerge between the traditionally valued role of publication and the totally necessary contemporary role of participation.
Of course the necessity of participation over the demands of publication makes for a large range of issues. These can be considered in relation to a few points:
- Performance is not measured by numbers online.
- Your professional identity is mediated by non-professionals.
- Everything is shared although it may not all be free (as in freedom not beer).
- You need to know who your audience is.
- You are an avatar.
Writing for the web is a basic element in negotiating the above five points. In this concext writing is
1. Performative
2. Mediated by professionals and non-professionals with equal access
3. Shared
4. With a Global Audience online 24/7
5. The author is a presence not only in the text but in the comments, critique, and possible remix
“What does it mean to be a digital worker today? The Internet has become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system where the sites and practices of work and play increasingly wield people as a resource for economic amelioration by a handful of oligarchic owners. Social life on the Internet has become the “standing reserve,” the site for creation of value through ever more inscrutable channels of commercial surveillance. This inquiry has important ramifications for struggles around privacy, intellectual property rights, youth culture and media literacy) Trebor Scholz, Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now? (Introduction – Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory).
In the digital economy people are now a resource and freelancing is becoming an increasingly important component of everyone’s working life. As a result it is important to pay attention to a collection of concepts and ideas that go under the title of ‘Branding’: How ‘what you do’ is related to ‘who you are’ in its presentation to your audience. This is bound up in relevance; how is what you do relevant to the people you are trying to communicate with. Personal branding is not necessarily a totally planned and conscious process. You are already doing most of what you are trying to present to people. You don’t need to (and should not) tailor your activities based on popularity or fame. But you need to package the presentation of your work and ideas in a way that makes it identifiable in an ocean of similar voices, images, texts and expressions. In this way design becomes relevant to how you work online. Interactive design, which according to Löwgren and Stolterman makes “ideas visible” (51) in “the process that is arranged within existing resource constraints to create, shape, and decide all use-orientated qualities (structural, functional, ethical, and aesthetic) of a digital artifact for one or many clients” (5). In considering your personal brand you should consider “use-orientated qualities (structural, functional, ethical, and aesthetic)” in the digital artifacts you are working with.
(Löwgren, Jonas, and Erik Stolterman. Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Print).
The following are tools of personal branding:
- Business card
- General resume/cover letter/references document (Keep it online and public)
- Portfolio
- Blog/website http://mashable.com/2009/01/13/social-media-resume/
- LinkedIn profile
- Facebook profile
- Academia.edu profile
- Twitter profile
- Video resume/portfolio (can be a personal presentation of your work or a collection of presentations and projects as videos)
- Wardrobe
The range of digital tools available for free, small cost or under license is huge. There is little point starting your investigation from the perspective of ‘finding the tools that can help me’. Rather, ask yourself what it is you want to do? Why are you considering adopting digital tools in your professional practice? Look to the examples of others; particularly in the field you work yourself and of people whose work you admire. Once again, building a network is extremely worthwhile.
Tools can be broken up into broader categories:
- Search (search engines, archive, tagging, storage, markup, )
- Visual (photo editing, photo creation, video- creation and editing, screen capture)
- Audio (recording, editing, creation, storage)
- Text (editing, markup, publishing)
- Sharing (P2P, file management, tagging, storage)
- Personal (email, website, creative, hobbies and pastimes, connections, avatars)
Based on these six categories the following posts comprise an online toolkit for academics and professionals using social media across their professional lives and particularly in relation to event management . We hope it is of use.
James Barrett
Jenna Ng
Transmedial Reality 