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Self-promotion, bloviating, and pontificatingApril 20th, 2006 |
It wasn’t that long ago that we heard endless horror stories about employees fired for blogging. Now, the Boston Globe tells us that blogs are essential to a good career.
Employers regularly Google prospective employees to learn more about them. Blogging gives you a way to control what employers see, because Google’s system works in such a way that blogs that are heavily networked with others come up high in Google searches.
This resonated because one of the things that market intelligence firms have been saying for the last couple of years when advocating corporate blogging is basically the same thing: blogs rank high on Google because they tend to be link-heavy; therefore, you want the blogosphere talking positively about your company.
The thing is, there’s still a lingering taint surrounding blogs. Consider Sheri Graner Ray’s response to Chris Bateman’s proposal that she blog, that blogs are mostly used for pontificating. (Sheri is a friend, so I take no offense at her saying that about this blog!).
Many have characterized blogs as a big conversation, but in practice they are far less conversational than, say, forums are. There’s one privileged speaker (sometimes several), and there’s an audience. The presumption is that any given blog is merely one node in the conversation — to get the whole picture, you have to visit other blogs. It’s presumed that if you really want to make a point and a name for yourself, you’ll have to have your own blog.
The fact that blogs are essentially somewhat democratized broadcast media is evident in the ways in which they have developed: the frequency of link-log posts, for example, which is classic regurgitation in the same manner that television uses it; the endless obsession with measuring audience metrics; the ways in which ads are embedded into what we call a “feed” — not a serving, but a feed, which conjures up images for food you’ll eat whether you like it or not; the proliferation of “greatest hits” lists on sidebars; the push towards tight audience verticals, where eclectic blogs are punished; and lastly, of course, the celebritization of those who write them.
I am reminded of the big old hardback book compilation on great books of the Western World, which had as its opening a pair of books entitled “The Great Conversation.” As if going from Tristram Shandy to John Locke was involving the common man (I recently saw a statistic that the average American adult consumes more information in one day that a 17th century average person saw in a year).
And yet, there is something to be said for the Boston Globe’s point. Obviously, someone out there with a blog with nothing to say will fail as a broadcaster. Broadcasting is hard, after all, even if it is out of fashion in these user-contributed times (witness the foofoorah over whether there’s any editorial control over links on digg.com). Social network effects mean that people who are initially just participants in a conversation get promoted up to the status of commentator whether they want to be or not — something that we have seen over and over again in forums, for example (I’d specifically cite Darniaq’s evolution from thread participant to essayist as an example, or the trajectory of Abalieno/HRose, out of our little MMORPG community).
How does this apply to games, or even to this website? Well, I’ve certainly felt comfortable enough in various forms of authoritative media: games themselves are one such form despite their heavy dose of interactivity; writing is definitely one such; making use of the UO website to write those first “UO essays” such as A Story About a Tree was absolutely employing a broadcast technique — at the time, it felt very much like a fireside chat to me. And of course, all the talks I give are literally lecturing from a privileged stage down at an audience. This website, which has been around since 1997 or so in one form or another, started not as a conversation but as an archive for exactly what Sheri calls it: pontification. For many years, the only public comment present was actually the guestbook, which was spammed to hell and gone.
A long time ago, on a different website, there was a game developer asking folks how to advance in their career, when they were getting passed over in favor of less experienced and possibly less skilled people who happened to be “flashier” or more celebritized. Alas, the answer is to celebritize yourself. Find the circles that you want to move in, be sure you belong in them, and then start taking part. If you belong there, you will quickly know.
This sounds like callous self-promotion, but it’s more than that: it’s also a path towards actually feeling happy. Being in the wrong circles is a sure way to be miserable. You need to be with your tribe. If your tribe is the group of folks who like to pontificate on the web about game design, then you should join in.
The “taking part” bit is important, though. You see, there’s an interesting tug of war there between regarding one individual’s opinion freely offered as being either self-important bloviating or a contribution to public discourse. Anyone who gets up on any sort of stage or takes any sort of podium has some ideas about their self-importance. There’s no stones to throw here, because just about everybody wants their opinions to be valued. When you talk to broadcasters who haven’t lost their enthusiasm for the practice or entertainers who do it for the love of what they are doing, a common thread that emerges is that they do it for the audience, not (only) for themselves.
“Give away things of value” is the core lesson. That’s how you self-promote effectively, and earn a lasting positive reputation. It’s how you earn respect — even when you are pontificating merrily along offering up stuff you think is good only to be shown to be utterly incoherent or flat out wrong.
In our own little circle of MMORPG fans, we have seen that people who might otherwise have been obscure have gained celebrity thanks to their open sharing of their thoughts. We have seen people hired on the strength of their thinking processes. We have even seen, in miniature, concerns over biased reporting. Just yesterday, I was drawn in, briefly, into the simmering controversy over whether or not danah boyd is truly an authority on Wikipedia… which strikes as almost metafictional, actually. Is the PhD student researcher on social software authoritative over the user contributed encyclopedia’s practices, or is the user-contributed encyclopedia entry authoritative over the career of the researcher? Paging Escher.
FWIW, I see this site as being much like reading my notes taken during class aloud to a bunch of folks who missed class that day; I’m usually only one day ahead of everyone else, and only because I was the only one not stricken with the flu. All errors in transcription and understanding are mine, and boy, will there be sone doozies — don’t expect to ace the test. But hey, we’re all in this class together, and we’re all really interested in the subject matter, and the classroom debates are often really good, even if the professor seems rather distracted by big money over in the private sector. Besides — any status I might have as an authority is strictly temporary. I had a doctor’s appointment the day that the class took over Eve, for example. We’re all students with megaphones.
So, bloviate away. If your notes suck, we won’t borrow them, and no one was hurt. But if they’re good, then maybe you’ll get recognized, hired, promoted, celebritized… and then you get to the hard part, which is doing actual good work. 
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[...] I was reading Raph’s entry today on self-promotion, bloviating, and pontificating and I realized that I, for a long time, have been in good practice in all three areas of skill — though woefully behind the times in my application of said skills. And though I have graduated to the grand title of software curmudgeon (I prefer the second defintion: irascible and cantankerous suite me much better than ill-tempered), the one thing I have learned in this software world of out-sourcing, in-sourcing, innovation, bubbles, bursts, paradigms, and fads is that one must keep oneself relevant. [...]
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