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You Suck At Your Job

By redjac ⋅ December 4, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

No, not you. Well, maybe you, I guess. I don’t know you, and I don’t know how good you are at your job, so… well, you might suck. Sorry. Truth hurts, man.

But that’s not my point. My point is that “you suck at your job” is a common rhetorical tactic in papers, presentations, emails, proposals, blogs, POVs, etc. And I am tired of it.

Thing is, it’s done neither so blatantly or so clearly. It’s done in the first slide of a presentation on Social Media: “Marketing Used to Be Easy.” It’s done in the research paper: “As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors.” It’s done in the proposal: “It’s not good enough to simply have a webpage any more.”

The message of all these statements is hidden but clear. YOUR JOB USED TO BE EASY. Your job used to be easy, now it’s hard… and you need me to help you deal.

Thing is, YOUR JOB WAS NEVER EASY. If you never use to have to deal with social media in your marketing efforts, then you never used to have a computer or the internet or rich collaboration applications, either. Technology gives as good as it gets.

If technology increasingly needs to deal with human factors, it only has to do so because it’s figured out lots of other things, like, I dunno, how to get the entire library of alexandria to show up on a kid’s monitor on a farm in Montana. Technology’s had a lot of shit to do, man, and new priorities don’t come out of the blue; they come out of the resolution of old priorities.That’s a bad example, though, because technology’s had to deal with human factors ever since people have been putting wool on looms. And that’s a corollary to the arguement; stop pretending that things we’ve had to deal with forever are brand new challenges. And “as the web becomes ubiquitous,interactive…” wait, what? Interactive? as opposed to when the web was non-interactive? And the last time the web anything less than ubiquitous would have to be before May 1995, when AOL gave its users access to the World-Wide Web.

Finally, “it’s not good enough to simply have a webpage any more,” while true, misses the point. Ever since newspaper advertising moved from type-only to include pictures, businesses have had to evolve the way they communicate with their customers. The idea that we were ever going merrily along until we got smacked in the ass by some  agent of change is ridiculous.

“Life is a process of becoming,” says Anaïs Nin, “a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” Yet much rhetoric treats the processes and struggles of the past as if their resolution means they never happened. But they did happen, and their resolution doesn’t invalidate that. We may have moved onto newer and more interesting things, but that will be old hat soon enough, and we’d do well to remember that. Past, present or future, your job is hard; apply yourself to the challenges of today without the need to hyperbolically dismiss those that have come before.