A friend asked me the other day how I was scratching my media itch, having made the jump to agency land.
I was somewhat surprised to realise I just didn’t care anymore. Which is kinda surprising, given that I’ve been doing media since I was in highschool, writing for the local newspaper. Most of my adult life has been about media and journalism – Indymedia, EngageMedia, New Matilda, social media and journalism research at uni.
I think a couple of things have caused this:
I recently had to deal with the fallout of not publicly commenting on a legal battle that two people that I knew were involved in. I lost two friends over this, and in part this caused me reconsider a job offer as a tech journalist.
About the same time, New Matilda, where I’d occasionally had articles published, shut down. I was sad, and disappointed, and I realised I didn’t want to try and build a relationship with a new publication.
I have also recently gotten incredibly tired of the constant policing and snark on Twitter. I know this was partially because of the people I follow(ed), but I don’t know how many times people can send snarky tweets to politicians about Twitter being a conversational medium before they twig that people use Twitter in different ways, and that’s ok. Similarly, after some of my friends called for Nick Carr to be strung up for suggesting a different way of laying out articles, I was thoroughly put off. Ditto for the constant snark and pettiness.
I’ve also reconsidered whether I want to re-engage with academia. As a friend who I’ve written papers with pointed out, taking up a career in agency-land doing UX / business analysis seems to preclude following the academic path, and at least for now, I’m inclined to agree.
The last straw, ultimately, was an academic I respected, and considered a friend, calling me retarded for expressing some of my feelings and doubts about cultural studies and some of its utopian elements.
Ultimately, I think I’ve reached a point where I can let go. Cultural studies will do its thing with or without me. Journalism will be what it is with or without me. Politics will go on. Anyone who is genuinely interested in what I think can always ask me, and hopefully won’t call me retarded if they disagree.
…
Maybe this is a transitional thing. I’m not saying I’m never going to write again – I enjoy writing. But for now, I’m happy to leave it.
So I’ve settled in at the new job. It’s busy, it’s stressful at times, I’m having to learn a lot.
It’s awesome.
Currently I’m working on internal workflows for a big CMS project, a content strategy and website redesign, a social media framework, a site audit and some other internal projects.
The people are professional, and the work management process is great.
As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been evaluating my current career lately. I’ve spent a couple of years in Sydney now, and have had the luck to work at some great organisations with some great people. I’ve worked with WWF Australia and Earth Hour, I’ve worked at EngageMedia, I’ve written for New Matilda.
However, at the back of my mind has been a concern over what direction to head in. I love academic research, but academia’s not for me. I love journalism, but I don’t know whether it’s a career path I want to follow, what with journalism jobs drying up and some of my favourite publications hitting the wall. Similarly, I’ve had some great fun working as a producer and social media person, but I don’t know if that’s where I want to focus. There’s not really a career path there yet. While I’m inclined to agree with Joanne Jacobs that there genuinely are social media experts, and I respect quite a few people working in the field, the industry here hasn’t really had a shakeout yet – and it’s draining having to fight off both self-proclaimed gurus and naysayers at the same time.
Thankfully, right in the middle of this, the wonderful chaps at Happener pointed out that some of the other work I’d been doing – getting sites working, redeveloping sites for different users, functionality development and testing, SEO oriented site development – was something I might consider specialising in, and would I like to have a chat to the people at Sputnik?
So, one thing lead to another, and I start at Sputnik in a couple of weeks as a business analyst, focussed on UI. Thanks again to Happener for all their help and support! And thanks to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of working with so far in Sydney, it’s genuinely appreciated.
From Wired – Mother Earth Mother Board, via Alex Burns:
In defense of telephony people, it must be pointed out that they are the ones who really know the score when it comes to sending bits across oceans. Netheads have heard so much puffery about the robust nature of the Internet and its amazing ability to route around obstacles that they frequently have a grossly inflated conception of how many routes packets can take between continents and how much bandwidth those routes can carry. As of this writing, I have learned that nearly the entire state of Minnesota was recently cut off from the Internet for 13 hours because it had only one primary connection to the global Net, and that link went down. If Minnesota, of all places, is so vulnerable, one can imagine how tenuous many international links must be.
Relying on technical acumen, the self-organisation of the internet and hacking classes won’t be enough. Censorship must become legally untenable, not just technically.
