Punch Brothers

Progressive Bluegrass band, the Punch Brothers.

The Medicine Wheel, redesigned

The most memorable and poignant piece that I took away from my (rather flacid) undergraduate degree was from an Indigenous Studies course I took in my third year. The professor was the strong and steady type, one who could coo any naysayer to his corner through the combination of charm and sheer logic. It was the kind of class that you would walk away from feeling like your life was in total shambles but that you had the tools, now, to fix it. 

Took a few minutes to redesign the Medicine Wheel, a First Nations model that encourages balance among the four quadrants that make up the human experience. According to First Nations philosophy, when one of these four pieces is off-kilter, the self cannot really function as a whole, to its fullest potential.  

When's the last time you can honestly say all four of these were satisfied?

Read more here.   

#Twitiquette

I’m having a bad day.

It’s certainly not the worst day I’ve ever had. But it is the day that I came to the realization that I have to start taking myself just a little more seriously, which sounds like a horrible thing that I don’t want to do. Especially being someone who’s sense of humour is akin to that of a twelve-year-old, that is absolutely, definitely bad news.

It started yesterday, as I prepared for a meeting with a potential client for some freelance work. The organization is a fairly prominent, well-respected NGO with a national presence. And that morning’s meeting would dictate whether or not they would choose to bring me on to develop a long-term communication strategy and reposition their brand in the community. It’s what I’m good at, and in theory their values and ideologies very much align with my own. And as I’m going through my usual morning routine, it occurs to me that I am quite literally one pencil-skirt away from landing a really great client. 

It went really well, and like most avid Twitter users, I felt the urge to tweet about it. I wanted to share with my two hundred followers what a great meeting it was and how proud I was to be working with such a valuable organization. I logon, am immediately distracted by the hundreds of tweets I missed during my meeting, and unconsciously wander over to my profile. 

I am horrified to find that the last thing I tweeted, the last 140 characters that I felt the need to share, included the terms ‘bummer’ and ‘naked lunges.’  I was, inadvertently, about to tweet about an important organization doing absolutely invaluable work in the community, right after a tweet about naked lunges. 

Everyone has their own purposes for using online tools. Sometimes those reasons are serious and professional, sometimes sarcastic and light. Sometimes they accurately represent us and sometimes they don’t  - either way, the point is to tell a story. And users of these tools have the agency to decide what kind of story they want to tell.

I was obviously not taking myself very seriously when I wrote that tweet. And that happens to be what I appreciate most in Twitter – my favourite users are the ones that make me laugh to myself on the streetcar home. I use Twitter to share goofy, uncomplicated thoughts and appreciate the poignancy of concise, hilarious observations. 

What’s the etiquette, or more accurately the twitiquette, behind censoring ourselves in the online community? Is it best to have a full-disclosure policy, to release unadulterated commentary into the world in the hopes that it presents a more holistic view of ourselves? Does it depend on the industry? The person? Does it matter at all?

Regardless of your position, online identities are public domain. These tools are real estate in the virtual communities that we occupy and in the same way you prepare your property for the housing market, there’s a pressure to trim the shrubs of your online presence. And the information that appears when you Google a name will inform your impression of them regardless of whether or not the story exposed is representative.

Consider Twitter as a kind of virtual handshake. A limp, sweaty Twitter feed is going to leave your audience uninspired and a little repulsed, and though it doesn’t necessarily reflect the work you produce, it doesn’t really lend itself well to a nice first impression. And it does somewhat force you to take yourself a little more seriously than you might normally, not because you must per se, but because this new professionalism has virtually no access to context and still manages to derive a lot of meaning. Where intonation, expressions, personality and other situational factors used to be more important, our virtual presence gathers its meaning from more abstract data (in one hundred and forty characters or less, for example).

Some people solve this by having multiple accounts – I couldn’t be bothered. I find myself submitting to the idea that maybe I’m at that point in my career to take myself – at least in the virtual world – just a little more seriously. And I guess I could cite my usual maxim; worse things have happened. Like world hunger. 

BSS | Breakfast Interrupted from Bruton Stroube Studios on Vimeo.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.