This week marks a milestone in my short blog-posting career. In the time that it has taken Lou Adler to post his eight-part omnibus On Becoming a Great Recruiter I have published a good many posts and left more comments around the place than Idi Amin had bastard children. And, as I am reminded that the consumption of human flesh must be an acquired taste – the African dictator was known for eating his detractors – I am also reminded that blogging may be a modern thing but the satirical post is not. Better known for Gulliver’s Travels with its prototypical little people and yahoos, Jonathan Swift is more enduring as one who knew a thing or two about horse-shit and how pretentious polite society can be. All this raises the whole issue of my own emerging online persona. Do I want to be known as a ranting firebrand barking for my own blogebrity or a bloggy-nerd preoccupied with the conversion of manure to live feed? I know for sure, neither of those things reflects who I am or what I aspire to. This online identity thing is a tricky business, difficult to manage for sure.
For others too, managing perceptions in this bubble should not be left to chance. I maintain an independent voice because all I have to share with you here is a part of me, a part of me that may not be PC enough to be corporately sponsored or packaged for mass consumption. And yet, here we are: icons, thought leaders, luminaries, and captains of industry, subject matter experts, professional pundits, front-line practitioners and naked-bloggers all sharing the same space and competing for the same something. Surely, a formula for the occasional ruffling of feathers wouldn’t you say?
If I had a comment for every email I received in response to my post Bill Cosby & John Sumser: Icons or Has-beens? that would have been one of the most commented on posts that I have written to date. The actual number may not seem much in the overall scheme of things, but what could have come of the thread: the realization that John Sumser’s interbiznet is a national treasure, a living history of online recruiting, or having to generate all that daily content is enough to make anyone cranky, or that John Sumser is hoping one day Jason Goldberg – prolific in his own right – will acquire his online franchise too? Why would so many prefer to comment off-line and effectively stump the post? It makes no sense, or does it? You there! Can I publish your email dated July 13, can I? Pour quoi?
Why would my reply properly correcting the Canadian Headhunter on his comments to my CollegeRecruiter.com post College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out be censored? Was it really too controversial for Steven Rothberg to publish or just too plain-spoken for “polite” company? Certainly, reproducing the reply here would be utterly useless, out of context. And, as I read what I felt obligated to post instead, I now feel the whole post – my honest effort – was somehow slaughtered in that one email that said, “You can’t say that. It’s too personal.” Why couldn’t I say what I had to say and then Steven Rothberg could have commented too, really got the ball rolling? Of course, if you’ve ever tried posting a comment on CollegeRecruiter.com you’ll know that it is like trying to spring a chastity belt with a bobby-pin. No key, no comment. So that’s a moot-mute point too I guess. Also, why do posts appear in reverse chronological order? To ensure that nothing makes sense?
And, why would David Manaster choose a curiously contrived email rather than reply to my Schmaltz Herring post when he could have embraced the readership, refuted the post, and leveraged the opportunity and forum to his own advantage perhaps? For example, he could have left this comment:
“Amitai, thanks for pointing out that I have been too busy to post but if you spent less time worrying about what I was doing and waited patiently for my reply you would have known soon enough that my time and effort has been given over to the launching my charity ERE Foundation – philanthropy I consider to be altogether more important than your silly little blog.”
“Ere, okay, David. Sorry.”
Yes, our online personas, personal brands, the management of perceptions – even the occasional marketing spin – becomes more important the more important you are. Blogging is a complex medium and it requires more than just an occasional post. When I started this blog, I didn’t know that, but I’m learning fast. Confusion and commitment are unkind teachers.
The democratization of the web, soap-box blogging as much a part of that as wikis, digging this, tagging that and what-have-you, cannot be realized when those who exploit blogging – legitimately I would add – for their own publishing gigs and empire building forget that, unlike political democracies, as leaders they are self-appointed, bought and paid for by favors and advertisers, elected to positions of “authority” by jerry-rigging the “election” process. They cleverly manipulate their “popularity” by building “credibility” by incredible means – search engine optimization and blog swapping and blending repurposed content, modern-day princes. And that’s okay, reality is what it is. But even in the virtual world we need a reality check from time to time. I say, the process of disenfranchising the dissenting voices – cutting us off at the comment – will not work. We’ll just blog and take another path of least resistance. We cannot be silenced unless we are scared into submission by the thought of being served up on some dictator’s dinner table. What bile!
Jonathan Swift was a brilliant satirist. At least I think so. I can only speculate how his “corrective purpose” would have taken shape if he had the benefit of real-time comments to reframe arguments and advance a meaningful social intercourse. When one chooses off-comment email to respond to a post, its potential is thwarted, the possibility of truth denied. If the suppression of discourse is not deliberate, the undertaker cares not. The post is dead. The stink is stunk. When comments are suppressed or avoided the cry for discourse becomes the shrill rant that blogging can so easily become. And when one’s emerging online persona appears to be mutating into something that does not reflect the real you, you are bound to try and fix it, no? I define who I am – not you. I don’t define who you are – you do. The sad part is we will continue to blog regardless of whether we should have started or not adding with varying degrees of regularity to the mind numbing cacophony of online drivel that on the one hand affirms our existence and on the other, simply negates it.
Here we are – a milestone in my short blog-posting career. The posts that I hoped would define me in this space – Hyperinflation, Possibility Recruiting, The Double Agent, India Stealing Jobs?, Your HR Guy Faces Off for example – eclipsed somewhat and temporarily by my own struggle to assert that I too have a voice. I will be heard. What resonates within me cannot be silenced until such time as I choose to return to a more sedate form of blogging: reading the feeds and being fed.
