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| From: xkcd.com/802 |
"Hi, I'm the Internet, and you now have to live ME, as well as your life."
Wh--hang on--just--hey wait a minute! Who do you think you are? I've got more than enough on my plate with REAL life without having to worry about you.
But the Internet is oblivious to this conversation. It acts as though it's been around forever, and seems to believe unquestioningly that it matters every bit as much as your other, more conventional life does.
No one can get by entirely without it. If you don't have an email account, you might as well not exist within the modern society that has completely fused with the virtual world. There is no escaping the circumstance (not that many people seem to want to).
But if you're an aspiring filmmaker, you've got to actually set up shop. You can't be a visitor, you have to be a resident. You have to make friends with your neighbors and work to improve the online community and contribute something. You've got to make a life within the upstart reality.
What does that mean? Well, as you can see, this is "Part 1" of this topic. In future installments, I'll talk about Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogging, websites, and so on and so forth. I'll get more specific. I'll share what I've learned from my own experiences and from others'. I'll be looking for advice from you, who may very well have been more successful at all this than I have.
For now, though, I just want to hammer this point home: You must work to build an online presence. That doesn't mean customizing your Gmail account. It means staking out a place in all of the digital venues that matter. It takes planning, consistent effort, and time.
That's actually one of the reasons I started this blog. I need to be more consistent with my contributions to the online community, and build a more robust virtual image. Like it or not, the aggregate of what I leave behind within this digital world will largely determine my future opportunities.
I need to promote myself, and so do you.
So what have you done, to that end? Do you have a YouTube channel? Do you use Facebook often and effectively? Do you blog? Tweet? Tumbl? If you haven't done much to establish an online presence, what do you plan to do in the future? What would you like to see me talk about?
Also, be sure to click "Follow" (it'll make me look more popular, which, I know, is what everyone really wants.) And if you like this post, share it!
hmmmm--I still don't get this. Could've sworn I posted a comment, but unless you deleted it...anyway. Agreed--to all the above. People who say they want to be self-employed usually don't grasp the concept because it means MORE time, effort, and commitment demands, not fewer and unless you choose to enslave yourself to yourself, you will, by default, find yourself enslaved to someone else--or, rather, to many many others, and primarily your task masters know nothing about you and don't care.
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