After my last post I sat down and spent some time pon­der­ing why it is rather dif­fi­cult for me to pro­mote my own work. I’ve been on uneasy terms with “the Inter­net” ever since I first became aware of it back in ’95 as men­tioned in a prior post. No doubt the web has cre­ated a lot of great oppor­tu­ni­ties for numer­ous cre­atives. Many who once strug­gled get­ting their work in front of peo­ple are now suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing them­selves, often accom­plish­ing quite amaz­ing feats of recog­ni­tion. These days it seems the whole world is online, open­ing numer­ous pos­si­bil­ity for find­ing one’s audi­ence. While back in the day authors needed pub­lish­ers to get their work out in the open they can now poten­tially do it all on their own. While musi­cians had to be signed to labels to sell their music they can now seem­ingly reach their lis­ten­ers directly. There are indeed many exam­ples of writ­ers and musi­cians and artists who have taken advan­tage of all those new pos­si­bil­i­ties and reached their dreams.

Human soci­ety reacts in much the same way to changes in the eco­nomic envi­ron­ment as nature in the eco­log­i­cal: the more you add on one side the more you have to remove on the other. A new species that becomes the pre­dom­i­nant inhab­i­tant of an area will dis­place a long estab­lished one. In eco­nomic terms: as new media rises old media declines. Many that once felt they were barred from oppor­tu­ni­ties are now cre­at­ing their own, in the process reduc­ing the avail­abil­ity of estab­lished oppor­tu­ni­ties. This can, and often does, neg­a­tively effect those strug­gling to take advan­tage of these new oppor­tu­ni­ties because they pre­fer the old ones.

New gen­er­a­tions are quick to say “out with old, in with the new”. Let enough time pass and the old becomes new again and the new old and the cycle restarts. Tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing is fre­quently frowned upon by those who feel that the new mod­els offer much more free­dom and oppor­tu­ni­ties. Though one impor­tant ques­tion begs answer­ing: how sus­tain­able can this “do it all your­self” approach be in the long run? While I could eas­ily dive deeply into eco­nomic terms and the rise, and fall, of big busi­ness and its under­ly­ing fun­da­men­tal needs and require­ments for cat­a­lysts I reckon it would sig­nif­i­cantly exceed any bear­able post length. The con­clu­sion though would be that each one of us has a sense of what is nat­ural for and to us.

The term nat­ural has a quite lengthy def­i­n­i­tion. In terms of this post I am using it as our very per­sonal per­cep­tion of what is right and what is wrong accord­ing to our unchange­able core char­ac­ter. If some­thing feels right it is nat­ural, if it feels wrong it’s unnat­ural. While we can expand our accep­tance of right and wrong from a ratio­nal point there is only so much stretch­ing we can ever do from an emo­tional point. We have an inher­ent nature and we can go with our against that nature. Going against it only works for so long until all sorts of psy­cho­log­i­cal effects set it.

If you’ve ever taken any form of psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indi­ca­tor. If not it is “a psy­cho­me­t­ric ques­tion­naire designed to mea­sure psy­cho­log­i­cal pref­er­ences in how peo­ple per­ceive the world and make deci­sions,” accord­ing to Wikipedia. There are four dichotomies: atti­tudes (favorite world), per­ceiv­ing func­tions (infor­ma­tion), judg­ing func­tions (deci­sions) and lifestyle (struc­ture). I’ve taken this test a few times, usu­ally out of curios­ity, and my type always comes out as INFP: intro­verted, intu­itive, feel­ing, per­cep­tive. In short the ide­al­ist. Those who have met me in per­son how­ever would most likely type­cast me as an ENFJ (the giver). That is because there is a cer­tain dual­ity to all of us. Under var­i­ous cir­cum­stances we can por­trait a slightly dif­fer­ent set of char­ac­ter qual­i­ties. How­ever, we can­not sus­tain those for a pro­longed period. Even­tu­ally we have to return to our core personality.

Being intro­verted means it is unnat­ural for me to inter­act with a large crowed. In fact, writ­ing this post is accom­pa­nied by feel­ing uncom­fort­able since it’s going to be pub­lished on my blog and thus be open to the world. I much more pre­fer inter­act­ing with indi­vid­u­als or a spe­cific group. When­ever I do so I feel in har­mony with my nature and are intensely focused on the task at hand and less so on my sur­round­ings. In a large group how­ever I am more focused on my sur­round­ings and I have a hard time get­ting through my task

There­fore, pro­mot­ing myself on the web to the pub­lic feels highly unnat­ural. It is not in har­mony with my nature. I can morph into an ENFJ for a period of time but like a shapeshifter in a fan­tas­tic story I even­tu­ally have to return to my nat­ural form. If for one rea­son or another I am forced to keep act­ing as an ENFJ I begin to waver. I’d rather have some­one else pro­mote me, endorse me. My nature prefers the tra­di­tional route of publisher/label for my work. Years ago when I wrote for mag­a­zines I accom­plished infi­nitely more than these days writ­ing on my blog (see archives for months long gaps).

I am all for progress. Any form of stand­still results in decline until things fall apart. But progress can only be accom­plished when con­sid­er­ing the past and poten­tial con­se­quences of a shift in approach. With a strong lean­ing towards inde­pen­dence from estab­lished busi­ness mod­els the ques­tion is where does this leave those of us who pre­fer inter­de­pen­dence? It’s a com­plex mat­ter that involves ques­tions of qual­ity vs. quan­tity, def­i­n­i­tion of qual­ity, gate­way and fil­ter func­tions once held by qual­ity keep­ers and the result­ing rise of medioc­racy. Per­haps though we’re already reach­ing a turn­ing point where the spirit of free, unapolo­getic explor­ing is once again being reigned in by an increas­ing desire for qual­ity of con­tent and crafts­man­ship. It will not end the under­ly­ing strug­gles, after all even refine­ment is a mat­ter of strug­gle, but it may just cre­ate more bal­anced oppor­tu­ni­ties as a result, oppor­tu­ni­ties that feel natural.

As always I invite you to share your very own thoughts on this matter.