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.

The ‘desktop’ in computer lingo refers to two separate ideas: the fact that a desktop computer isn’t portable (it sits on your desktop) and visual metaphor of the interface (the opening screen with your files sitting on it is your metaphorical desktop.)

The laptop computer doesn’t have the same relationship – sure, you can use it on your lap – but it still uses the desktop metaphor for the computer interface. You can’t lay out all your real-life files on your lap as you can on your desk.

In this respect, I think the move away from multitasking on the iPad represents a genuine ‘laptop’ computer. Singular focus, relaxed usage, in line with how you would actually work when you’re on the couch.

Craig Thomler has a great analysis of a social media job up at the moment, unpacking the somewhat ridiculous requirements of this particular position:

a strong understanding of how the web and social media operate, the ability to contextualise that within the Government’s needs and find creative solutions; and have the technical skills to transform those solutions into product within tight deadlines!

You will need excellent communication skills, and experience in website design and development and in project and database management. You will be proficient in using a range of web design applications including Adobe Photoshop, have a sound knowledge of HTML, and a strong understanding of web publishing principles and techniques.? Knowledge of relevant web standards and guidelines and community engagement practices are essential! Experience in multimedia authoring and video production would be a strong advantage.

While he does have some valid critiques, it’s not impossible to find people to fill these roles. I’ve had positions like this over the last couple of years, and they’re not always bad, if the person in the position isn’t expected to do everything. Without getting into the everlasting debate around whether social media experts exist, it’s possible to have substantial experience in social media research, analytics and execution, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that in an online media position.

However there are a couple of major issues that I’ve been finding working on these kinds of roles. The first is that when you have such a broad range of experience / skills, you end up being the go-to person for technical support. I had this problem working at university, where I was known as someone who could edit video, fix a CMS, get a printer working, etc. I ended up coming into my office at 4pm and working till 2am just to get my own research done.

The second is managing expectations. Editing video and multimedia takes a long time, and doing it well takes even longer. When you couple that with the million-and-one things you have to do daily to keep the CMS up to date, maintain running social media conversations, monitor for feedback, run SERPS and so on, you end up pushing the longer, focussed tasks to the back of the queue. Time management becomes a huge pain, because you often can’t block out time for focus – and this impacts both your state of mind (constant split focus) and your professional development. There’s no time to learn how to do anything particularly well, because you don’t have the time to allocate to deliberative practice. You might get better at multitasking and responding quickly, but professional development ends up happening when you do it on your own time.

That feeds into the other major issue with these roles – you end up getting spread sideways instead of moving upwards. There’s no established career trajectory for this kind of role, and you often simply end up getting weighed down with more and more duties. It’s no coincidence that these roles are almost always 6-12 month contracts.

So the video editing continues apace. The story is still coming together – though the structure kind of makes sense now. I’m trying to convey the clash of frameworks that the COP15 represented – self regulation vs UN, green capitalism vs anti-capitalism, insider dealing vs direct action protest. I keep coming back to an interview with a Burmese activist who wanted to know how we could come up with a fair agreement when his representatives were his oppressors. And I can’t help but think that he’s right, but the alternative is to… do what?

Sydney Park at sunset. IPhone and camerabag, cross colour filter, double processed.

I’m hiding out in the edit suite, working on a documentary for EngageMedia about the COP15 process. Hopefully it’ll be screening next month as part of the Time For Reel Action compilation (which is the other thing I’ve been spending most of my time on!)

It’s not an easy process – I’ve got about 2 weeks worth of footage, to start with – but honing in on the story I want to tell is difficult. I’m still undecided as to whether I think the failure was inevitable.

I’ve never been a huge fan of summit-hopping, and I’m pretty dubious of the Cokenhagen approach as well, but I’m just sure of where I stand. Still, working on the documentary is helping me clarify some of it….