Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Do you perform? Are you an introvert?

JJProjects posted a pretty thought-provoking piece on Twitter yesterday:

People always talk about community and conversation, but hardly ever about performance. People don't like to speak of this in those terms

He then said it on 12Seconds:


Community, Conversation and Performance on 12seconds.tv

(Check out the following conversation)

Once I'd sorted out that he meant performance as in "Broadway" as opposed to "Performance Management", JJ's thoughts tapped into my own latent thinking about this area.

When you perform, life is fun. That's what the people in the book Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results found out, that having a performance mentality can make even mundane tasks into a game.

Performance could also be called acting. Some people think of acting as being fake, as being something else. But anyone who's done a drama course, or studied the Robert deNiros and Dustin Hoffmans of this world, knows that can't be true. Acting is a way of letting the real you out!

And so is social media. Yesterday I got a review copy of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, written on the premise that "the internet's widespread anonymity eliminates boundaries and encourages otherwise polite people to be downright abusive."

That may be so for some, but I've seen the other side of the coin - real people, exploring and discovering themselves, learning how to become "micro-famous" ... not necessarily for the esteem of others but out of sheer curiosity about what makes us tick.

So... back to performance ... how about this statement:

The self-publishing tools of the internet give people like me (particularly introverts) a playground to explore, discover what I have that is unique to the world.

It's like an incubator for self-branding.

There's a lot in this. Thankfully this is a blog post, not an article or a book, so it's okay that these are fragmentary, half-formed thoughts. There's something to the performance aspect, and there's something to the game aspect that I haven't even touched on it.

And there's also something to the introvert side of it. I find that self-expressing through blogging and Twitter has made me generally more confident in physical-world (I despise the term "real-world", as if what we do on the internet isn't real) situations.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts.

Possibly related:
Courage and Cameras
Virtual, or Fake?

No comments: