Marieke, over at RemoteWorker, asked me to do a guest blog post around this issue of being a remote worker and establishing a profile at your work place, which you can read in full on her blog.
I mixed up several issues, the first being the effectiveness of being an online worker, where I made a (tongue-in-cheek) comparison with the power-breakfasters of yore:
In the 1980s in the heyday of the Yuppie, there was talk of the ‘power breakfast’ when Masters of the Universe would meet at breakfast to do business to show how tough they were. This is nothing – nowadays I get up and reply to some tweets, put a comment on someone’s blog, respond to comments on my own blog that have come in overnight and maybe even produce a quick publication in the form of a blog post. I have done global networking before I’ve changed out of my pyjamas. And I’m pretty normal in this.
I also wanted to explore the notion that our online presence is somehow an improvement on our real identity, ie the online me is superior to the 'real' (or at least the real-time) me in many senses:
I know that some people now don’t bother attending my ‘live’ presentations (or are unconcerned if they miss them) because they know I will put them up later. And more than that, I feel that I have time to correct the presentations (although they still remain a fine example of amateur hour) so that the recorded version may well be superior to the live one. I think this may pervade across all of my online identity: my blog has more interesting things to say than I do, and my twitter stream is wittier than I am. I have become like one of those bands of whom people bemoan ‘they’re not as good live’. And as we perfect our online skills, maybe this is the fate that will befall us all. In which case, don’t ask me to give a keynote, I’ll just record you one instead.
I was just exploring some ideas here, so pop over to Marieke's blog to give it a read.
Comments