Under the microscope

I have recently begun building a web presence. Ultimately, I will have pages on various social networking sites, membership in professional networks, a personal web page, at least one blog (beyond this one), and other possibilities I am only beginning to consider.

The current term attached to this kind of web presencing is 'Personal Branding'. Before broadband hit the home, very few people knew how to follow your activities online. And most of your life was lived offline, anyway. Now? Anyone with sufficient time and determination can find out just about anything you do online, unless you are a better hacker than they are.

That includes everything you might be doing while connected to some part of the telecom network (which contains the Internet, for the most part). That includes who you text, call, e-mail, IM, what you tweet, what sites you log into, what media you stream and download, every communication you have ever undertaken online.

Think about that for a moment. The article I would like to discuss made it clear to me how far this has gone.

I received a link to this article from LinkedIn. It talks about how HR people in companies you are applying to for jobs are checking you out. The link is here.

The tone of the article is surprisingly neutral, given that the message is quite chilling. The initial paragraph uses the very pointed phrase 'come back to haunt you'. However, the rest of the article is pitched more at providing basic information rather than continuing the scare.

It is interesting to note that the article states quite clearly that the author disapproves of this practice. He says that the people surveyed 'think they are justified' in searching out information on applicants online. This directly implies that the author disagrees with their assessment.

The graphic to the right of the title is taken from George Orwell's classic '1984'. Big Brother has become a ubiquitous term since the beginning of online lives. Anyone who has read '1984' finds this truly a chilling reference. Or would have, before it became an almost meaningless meme.

The tone in the later parts of the article have more to do with the author's disbelief that people think they are not being watched. He references 'how few job seekers are aware of their personal brands', soon followed by a very short sentence 'It's crazy.' His final comment in that paragraph uses the word 'surveillance'. There are few things quite as disturbing as the thought that we are not only being watched, but judged, as well. Nobody is surveilled who is thought to be innocent, after all.

Overall, the language is not directly intended to frighten. It seems more of a 'why aren't you paying attention?' type of piece.

What strikes me is the next obvious step. Soon, job seekers are going to start checking out employees and managers at companies they apply to. It will be interesting to see whether or not the corporations put up with that.

Rhetoric Past and Future

Rhetoric is a word with a great deal of history behind it. Even before it was something that people began to study, it was used. We have called it argument, or persuasion, or even the fundamental language of learning. During some parts of history, it was considered the noblest of pursuits. Today, the phrase ‘mere rhetoric’ implies that the use of persuasive words has become something unclean.

The twentieth century saw exercises in rhetoric on a global scale. World War II was defined, not by weapons and the bomb, but by the rhetoric of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin. They led their peoples not by being individual soldiers, but by speaking. It was through words that Germany rose up, it was through words that the British resisted for so long. It was through words that Roosevelt was able to turn a shaken and frightened country into the juggernaut that finally ended that war.

But there were others, in the twentieth, and we should not forget them. Ghandi, whose only weapons were words. Einstein, who tried so hard to stop the building of the device he created, and who had so much to say on the nature of peace afterwords. And there was Mao, with his little red book full of words, persuading a people to turn their backs on three thousand years of cultural history.

And others. People we now call marketers, and advertising consultants. People who have learned how to use words to polarize, and divide. People who have learned how to make simple debate impossible by requiring shades of only black and white. Politicians and car salesmen, copy writers and philosophers, the death of journalism, and the coming of the Internet.

Science fiction writers have long summoned visions of what the future might be like. Rocket cars and food pills, and a thousand other treats of the imagination. What they did not see was the coming of the word to every desktop, to every home, to every person walking down the street. We now have access to each other, and to each other’s rhetoric. We cover the world in persuasion towards this point of philosophy or that. We have the ability to communicate, not nation to nation, or statesman to ambassador, but person to person.

Rhetoric is about to come back into its own, or it will be lost forever in a sea of trolls and flamewars. The ability to persuade is once again the greatest skill we can pursue. In order to be heard, we must be exceptional. In order to change the world, we must shout, but clearly and convincingly. Words are the currency of today, and they are both cheap and expensive.


Michael Sasser

From the Fire

Words come from the fire. Old men in Old days sitting before the roasting pig chanting syllables into the smoke. He sought to keep the spirits away, or near, as was his belief.

His descendants began to name things. To name a thing is to have power over that thing, many systems of belief say. We named each other, and the parts of the world. We named the sky, and the lightning, and our children.

From these words came places. Places we had never seen and might see only after our deaths. Sky realms and underground, in the waters and on the breezes. And the world grew under our words.

And now we name the dark places we all know. The hardness inside, and the subtle tortures we inflict. All of these things have names, and the words we use become more than they were.

What once were nameless chants on the savanna now encompass us. The stories we tell have become what and who we are. Religion, politics, science, education, all of these things attempt to describe what we know to be, and what we hope or fear may happen.

To write these stories, one must know the world. Not in its entirety, but in its details. We must see the light and the darkness, the pain and the joy, that come from every place and every time. They loved their children on the savanna, and made stories to teach the ways of the world.

We love our children now, and tell them what stories we believe reflect the world. We write new stories, hoping to find even more in them. More about ourselves and more about everyone else.

Stories are one of the few universal things. We tell stories out of instinct, out of that desire to show who we are, and to understand it ourselves.

I write to know. To understand. To become. There are no other reasons.