Squidoo

In my last post I used Seth Godin as a fall guy, the bearer of “bad news.”  My views are in a dynamic tension with his, but he cannot be discounted lightly.  In this short post, I’d like to lay out why I’ve joined his latest venture by creating my own presence on Squidoo.  As with most, all?, successful web ventures,  Squidoo has a cute name, and a simple concept, well articulated and well established.  It provides a platform for “user-generated content” where people can build their presence on the web.  This all seems safely, innocuously, so web 2.0!  Trendy and light….  But it uses its internal parameters as a learning tool.  It subtly, and at times blatantly, leads us to appreciate an underlying ethos.

That ethos is powerful, and refreshing.  Fundamentally, it celebrates passion, asking us  to do things because they are meaningful to us instead of merely acting out of narrow perceptions of self-interest.  It’s a bold concept, one that has been behind everything I’ve tried to do, and one that is best entered into in an environment where the stakes are apparently low. 

I had a similar idea, although not so sparely put, in Designer & Client, when I posited that imagining, and then creating, a pleasure boat was an activity outside of normal questions of necessity and expedience.  That if this concept were embraced, and the process appreciated to its potential, it could bring about transformative change.  “Go through deciding, designing, building and sailing a boat with no other purpose than to satisfy yourself, and you will change, for the better.”  That could have been the title….

The intervening years have pushed even small, humble pleasure boats out of the reach of many, and few of those who can still afford it are looking for enlightenment in the process.  What had been a quixotic exercise is now?…

Squidoo brings these ideas into a field that has much wider scope in our day.  Many people around the world have internet access.  Everyone has something they care about, something that matters to them, deeply, for whatever reason, or no articulated reason.  With Squidoo, they all have a place where they can showcase their passion and share it with a wider world.

Many tend to see the desire to forge a web presence as a narcissistic urge, a desire to say, “Look at ME!” and have the world take notice.  This is a cynical view, I fear.  Cynical because it ignores our fundamental need to connect, and feared because for so many, this stream of electrons seems the most viable conduit to making viable connections. 

This is a basic human need, human drive.  We cannot live in isolation, in a world where our cares, the things and people we care about most, are ignored.  We are more and more isolated, atomized, surrounded by strangers in our everyday circles within the real, not virtual world.  Ideally, we would not need to bend this basic drive to fit down the thin reed of an internet connection, but there we have it.  Realities are ignored at our peril.  Denial only hurts the one hiding from facts on the ground.

That brings up another positive, laudable initiative behind Squidoo.  A refreshing overturning of what marketing has meant for a century, that outgrowth of Nazi social science more damaging ultimately than rocketry, less obviously deadly, but much more pernicious.  Seth is part of a movement looking at the changes new media have brought, searching out what these changes mean to the dynamics of broad-scale communication.  The era of scarce media and pushed messages is winding down, crumbling not only due to the availability of cheap internet, but wider forces, the kinds of things I fill most of my posts with.

Without restating their case here, imperfectly, I want to stress the kernel I find so laudable.  Seth maintains, insists even, that economic value can be found – I’d like to hope can ultimately only be found – by doing what you are compelled by your inner passions to do, communicating whatever that is with all the authenticity you can muster.  Muster, not fake, “Effective advertising is all about sincerity kid,”  you can just imagine a character on MadMen saying, “Learn to fake that, and you’re got it made, buster!”

I’ve written on this before, authenticity, authority.  What I like about Squidoo is that it is a tool to practice authenticity, and develop a true authority, developing a voice of your own that carries a truth in it.  One might start by creating a fan page for some celebrity, fully immersed in pop culture’s destructive web, and proceed step by step towards discovering for oneself what is good about having a passion, how it gets better as one hones the what of it, the how, and arrives at a why.