Author Archives: Tariq West

Person and Profession

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Blindness – "Sounding Off By Profession" Clip from Tariq West on Vimeo.

It strikes me as odd how we use occupational labels to describe people outside of a work context. I remember sophomore year of college when I was applying to finance internships and several friends took to introducing me as “the banker”. They probably meant it flatteringly mostly, alluding to my apparent ambition; they may also have been calling me a pretentious d-bag.

It bothered me. I wasn’t a banker.  If I worked in finance or at any other job, I would hope people could find something more descriptive of me than my occupation. You know, like social commentator or paradigm shifter or peace keeper (I can dream right?).

Watching the film Blindness reminded me of this pet peeve.  In an early scene, the newly-blind victims of some mysterious ailment introduce themselves as “pharmacist,” “taxi driver,” “financial planner,” “optometrist” etc… It begged the question of how they each settled on those labels as the most relevant ones, even above their names or hometowns.

The filmmakers seemed to make the point that our positions within society are fragile and not as weighty as we tend to believe. If we were stripped of our sight and left to fend for ourselves, the precious labels we construct wouldn’t matter.

A viewer could almost as easily take away something much more insidious; that economic labels are what remain when everything else is stripped away, and that our truest selves are somehow related to our economic agency.  This is why I find occupational labels problematic.

Why don’t we introduce our doctor friends as “healers” or our lawyer friends as “justice advocates”? Probably because the labels themselves connote a sort of institutional ethos vested with virtues such as healing or the pursuit of justice. But that is not all they’re vested with. They’re laden with status and reek of economic utility.

Other occupations that are not institutionalized professions, such as “hotel maid” or “tax driver”, are even less useful as labels outside of a work context. They do not reveal anything about an individual’s inner life, about who they are and what they would like to offer the world.

Not all doctors are healers nor all lawyers advocates for justice. Some taxi cab drivers are sophists and humorists, some bartenders, spiritual counselors and entertainers.

Occupational labels can be useful, valuable even. We may short-change ourselves though, by applying them as defaults rather than just when they are useful for conveying economic information (i.e. what skills and knowledge we have to sell).

Surely we can find better, truer ways of describing ourselves, of conveying not just what we are “certified” to do, but what we choose to do and why. Go ahead, try it. Come up with a label for yourself that better describes your inner motivations, your person.

Now put it into circulation.

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This post is featured on: The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist
Originally posted on Tariq's Tumble

How to blog about social media, gen-y and other buzzwords – a satire

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There are certain essential elements which anyone who writes about social media, web 2.0, gen-y, personal branding, careers or closely related subjects should be aware of. They form a canon, a sort of tao, if you will.

Let's begin at the beginning. Well, before the beginning really. Mark Twain once wrote,"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." Start by putting on your clothes. Before you write you must establish your ethos.

This means settling on a good head-shot, coming up with a compelling story around why you're unemployed (referencing "The 4-hour Workweek", of course), deciding what niche you'll be a self-proclaimed expert in and creating a profile on every social media site. With your ethos firmly established, now you may begin to write.

Titles are what really draw people in, so use one or all of the following conventions around title writing. The best is generally "X ways to do Y" (e.g. "5 ways to be inane on twitter while gaining followers"), but sometimes the urgent  call to action like "X things you/your business needs to know in order to do/avoid Y", is a better option (e.g. "5 social media tools every business should use to avoid bringing about the twit-pocalypse").

gen-yAlso, if you are afraid your title is a little too vanilla, throw in a buzz word or two -"social media" or "web 2.0" will usually do just fine. If there is a new mobile media device coming out soon, like an iphone, ipad or netbook, you can use that too, even if it doesn't have much to do with the content of the post (e.g. "5 ways the ipad will revolutionize your love life"). Also, consider adding "2.0" to any noun or verb to make it somehow new, exciting and hip (e.g. "Detroit 2.0" or "Gutter Cleaning 2.0"). 

Then there is the somewhat more trivial matter of content. Try these out as rules of thumb. It's rarely a good idea to write anything longer than 300 words – it makes people's heads hurt, especially if you use big words, like "rigorous". Begin, or end, your post with a common quote or truism like "we all know how important it is to be yourself" or "we can do anything we want if we stick to it long enough" – anything you've seen re-tweeted or on a refrigerator magnet will do. Also, consider a selection from any number of self-help books.

Next, create a list – numbers are better, but bold sub-headings will do. This breaks the post up into chunks telling your readers, "this is a blog and narrative flow has no place here". If you don't have anything to say, that's fine – interview a pseudo celebrity or self-proclaimed expert.

Alternately, share a story or experience about how motivated and smart you are – remember to add in some buzz words (I suggest "personal brand" or "Millennials") to make it topical. Also, add an inspirational take-way or call to action, like "What would you do if you were as beautiful and talented as me?" at the end so as not to seem self-centered.

If you are writing about careers, talk about "passion" and "loving what you do". Be careful not to define concepts too clearly. Also talk about the importance of developing a unique brand and putting yourself out there with social media tools – it's been said before, but you must be brazen enough to say it again.

For posts on the value and potentials of social media, either be exuberant or damning. Do not be nuanced – it might be confused for a lack of an opinionated stance. Alternatively, be completely ambiguous.

The same is true about writing about Gen-y; make broad generalizations about either how unrealistic, un-disciplined or illiterate we are or pine about how digitally enlightened and natively skilled we are. Also, consider writing about how to manage or market to Millennials – they do not speak English but rather English 2.0.

Never forget to note the "fundamental differences" between Gen-Y's approach to anything, and every one else's. If Baby Boomers shaved with straight razors, Gen-y will buck that and do it using the power of the social web.

Your audience is the most important element, so keep in mind that, for the most part, you are preaching to the choir – most of your readers are other bloggers who write about the same things you do. Do not critically analyze anything – by doing so you risk being critically analyzed yourself.

To appeal to your audience, raise your credibility and as a killer starting (or ending) point for a post on just about any topic, quote Penelope Trunk, Dan Schawbel, Chris Brogan or Seth Godin. Finally, fluff is the stuff that fills your stuffed animals and your pillows – it is comforting and it is good! 

What do you think are the essential elements for blogging about social media, careers, gen-y and personal branding?

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Over the past several months I've read dozens of blogs and hundreds of posts, many of them around topics like personal branding, careers, social media and gen-y/millennials. In this piece I share some observations I've taken away about how to write on these topics. I make this entry into the public record in the tradition of "How to write about Africa" and "How to write about poor people", hoping it is received in the playful (if somewhat satirical) spirit in which it was conceived. I am guilty of most of the things I satirize.

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This post is featured on:
 The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist

What does it mean to be a netizen?

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Back in December in a post on the Open Government Directive, social media expert Steve Radick wrote, "The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship are changing, and we [government practitioners] need to be educated—at every level—on how and why to engage through open government channels." This resonated with me: What does citizenship look like in the age of the internet? What new citizen "duties" are emerging on the social web?

When I think of citizenship on the web, it is not in the conventional "national citizen" sense. Rather, citizenship takes on a broader, and perhaps equally important, meaning: internet citizens ("netizens" as Michael Hauben dubbed us) are people who have a stake in the evolving content and character of the web.

In this sense, internet users are citizens in a world of ideas, participants in an ongoing knowledge and value (in the "societal values" sense) creation experiment. Although language, technology access and literacy, and censorship still represent barriers for some, the conversation is increasingly global.

The on-line world is a democratic space. People "vote" in this space by consuming, responding to (e.g. by commenting on blogs), sharing, promoting (e.g. within ranking systems like Digg) and creating content. Like more traditional democratic spaces, the web favors those who engage, those who say and do things, over those who do not; people who engage have a say in shaping the online world. It's worth noting that, like other democratic spaces, some have more influence, "more of a vote", than others because of structural and other factors (e.g. what sites a search engine ranking algorithm favors).

The Internet is saturated with information (too much for any one individual to sort through) and crowded with competing narratives; the information and narratives that bubble up to the top become public "knowledge". The content that surfaces (e.g. the first page of Google results on a given topic) might be taken to represent a sort of consensus on what is "valuable", maybe even what's "true".

With this in mind, I posit that engagement on the internet is perhaps, like civic engagement in the off-line world, a "duty" of citizenship. If we want our values to be reflected in the presiding culture, if we want the best information to rise to the top, we have to assert ourselves through all of the mechanisms available to us.

While many consume content, fewer share it and fewer yet, actively curate or create it. This worries me. Why? Because many quarters of the internet are effectively "dictatorships of the loud" – people who create content often and are good at promoting it, disproportionately impact the conversation regardless of how sound their ideas are. The inane or fluffy often wins out over the useful or profound.

I started writing not because I'm the most expert person on many of the subjects I write on, but because I'm not the least – I'm trying to drown out the one guy dumber than me. And I'm not just blogging; I'm scouring the internet for ideas that represent our best values and promoting them; I'm seeking out bull and blasphemy and calling it out for what it is. I figure It's the least I can do to help shape the Internet, and the World.

What do you think, what does it mean to be a 'netizen'?

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This post is featured on:
The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist

Walt Whitman, Jeans and the Ethos of Gen-Y

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Every once in a while someone conceives of a commercial campaign that hits with the realness, poignancy and vision reminiscent of the Great American Novel (adapted of course for a commercially saturated generation with a 30 second attention span); a commercial which captures the frustrations and aspirations of its time and holds them to the light of the nation’s most cherished ideals.

In its summer campaign titled “Go Forth”, Levi’s achieved this in a poetically compelling and commercially brilliant way. The two commercials produced by Wieden+Kennedy (of Old Spice fame) are set to grainy 1890s recordings of Walt Whitman reciting two of his masterful odes to the intrepid American spirit, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America”.

The first commercial opens with a young man standing in the wilderness at dusk, flaming torch in hand. As thunder rolls in the background, Whitman’s words, “Pioneers! O Pioneers! Come, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” sound like the rallying call of a generation and in every corner of the nation young people look up as if suddenly alert to the possibility and adventure in the world. Whitman’s recitation continues over images of young people gathering, suiting up in jeans, and preparing to emerge from concrete cities into nature, danger and the unknown.

The second commercial opens to a night scene, dimly lit by a flickering neon sign that reads “America”. The sign is crooked and half-submerged in water and the debris in the background suggest a city in decay. As flares explode over the sign, alluding to a certain poignant verse in the national anthem, Whitman begins, “America. Center of equal daughters, equal sons. All, all alike endear'd”. The images that follow – derelict apartment buildings, violent protest – tell of troubled times while others – young, vibrant, muscled people flexing, climbing, jumping, kissing – allude to an enduring strength and beauty in the American character.

The commercials tap deep into the consciousness of today’s youth – teens and twenty-somethings increasingly disillusioned with the world they are inheriting; they tell a story about corruption and decay, crisis and stagnation but also about great American ideals, how they endure and how they can be recaptured. “What happened to that pioneering American spirit?” the commercials seem to beg of the viewer. “What happened to that brazenness that looked west across America at danger and the unknown and saw opportunity?”

As much as I hate to see great American literature coopted to sell clothes, I have to hand it to Levi's and W+K for feeling the pulse of a generation. What's more, I really hope Gen Y can recapture some of these ideals, and more than just aesthetically. For the web piece of the Levi's campaign, W+K invented the fictional character Grayson Ozias. At the risk of elevating a commercial gimmick to art, maybe there is something valuable we can take from him:

"I left my home and all I knew because I feared the complacency that was growing in me. I feared that I would be content to never experience anything of America beyond the city in which I was born. But after hearing Whitman, this complacency became unthinkable, and my comfort became my greatest burden."

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This post is featured on:
The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist

This Blog: “A poem about a story”

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Over the past few years I've been a voracious consumer of online content, particularly blogs; recently I've decided to engage more actively in the conversation. I am more than a little bit nervous about this first foray into the blogosphere. Well, third foray really. I started blogging briefly when I was in Spain last Spring, hoping to capture and share some of the richness of that experience. Before that, back in my brooding, awkward teen years I kept a livejournal (since purged), which bore witness to the blunders and absurdities of that period.

What I learned from those early exercises in blogging is that you can't say everything – you have a couple hundred words and an hour here and there to create a vignette of an idea or two – and it requires a lot of discipline to keep it up. I also learned a little about the risks of this public medium; you risk being wrong, contentious, late, redundant, irrelevant, pompous and boring. You must have the courage, brazenness even, to believe that you have something worth adding to an ongoing conversation crowded with experts and pundits, cretins and trolls.

I read a review last spring of a film without a discernible plot; the critic wrote that the film wasn't a story so much as it was "a poem about a story" – a phrasing which has since become a standard in my expressive lexicon. That's what I'm trying to do – surface a few interesting ideas and leave some distinct impressions about how to do good while seeking abundance. I'm not trying to tell a cohesive topical story here (not yet anyway) but rather trying to put together an illuminative montage, a "poem about a story".

I give you "Tariq's Take". Enjoy or ignore at your leisure.