In the very same manner, people that respond to being called “intellectual” very often seem to lack just that very thing. Intellect. An intellectual is someone who has failed in his aspiration towards intellect and thus covered his or hers shortcoming by simply adopting the title. There is no inherent evil in so doing, it is probably a part of human biology. We simply cannot help ourselves. It only becomes evil coupled with aspirations towards power and control. Perhaps – the one follows the other.

Expanding the thought towards anyone referring to themselves as experts is not hard to do, either. A self-promoted expert has no, or at least should have no, credibility. Knowledge is subtle and by its very nature questing. And questioning. The old proverb of the more you know the less you know certainly seems to do the assertion justice.

Mistrust intellectuals and mistrust self-proclaimed experts. Look for knowledge where none is seemingly to be found and question the knowledge that you have aquired. It would seem that the attitude of at least admitting the possibility of not knowing best is the most rewarding in the long run.

After all, people who turn out to be right most of the time seldom find any real satisfaction from it.

I stumbled upon this article this morning. Briefly, a young, and for all intents and purposes very able, young psychology student is interviewed on his outlook on the current state of psychology. The article is the latest in a series intent on enlightening the general public on the subject. Fair enough.

The interviewee scores high points for refusing to align his career along the come-all, save-all fad of cognitive behavioural therapy – but I do wonder if it really was him or the journalist who ran the piece into the proverbial gutter by claiming that the public would be better served by therapy than by a new pair of jeans – and not mentioning this once, but enough times to clear it of any evidence of circumstance.

The problem with making such statements and at the same time trying to elevate therapy into a viable option for self-improvement puts it right beside the line of the thing that same statement tries to debase. It’s clearly saying: “Don’t buy new jeans, buy this instead”. Sound like an ad to you? Well, it is. Everyone’s selling you things. Except that in therapy, you’re not in charge anymore (go ahead, prove to me that you know me better than I know myself). You’re handing the reigns over to someone else. The reverse isn’t valid for buying a new pair of jeans.

Furthermore, it makes the rather lofty and uncalculated claim that whenever you purchase a consumer good, you’re actually compensating for something. While it may be true in some cases, it certainly isn’t valid as any real recruitment into a therapy session. Not a serious one, at least. If you’re not willing to actively think about your own progress, development and whatever issues you wish to improve – there’s little chance that someone else will fix this for you, either. Certainly, it helps to have close friends and family that will listen – but this is in no way crucial. Therapy can be a help here, if for nothing else than at least for having someone to pose questions that you’re unwilling to pose yourself – but to claim that you should do this rather than purchasing a product is simply ridiculous and naive advertising. And well on that road, we can claim that therapy is nothing more than packaging a relationship into something you can market. A way of branding human relations and selling them at a profit (say, does any other form of this interaction spring to mind…?)

It may be nothing but an unfortunate angle played well past its point in the article, but the bottom line is that if you are going to sell something, adopt a better strategy for this than knocking the other products you’re competing with. All brands of jeans know that much already…

And while we’re at it: Playing the devils advocate, it may also be claimed that a new pair of jeans will help you attract a member of the opposite sex (ugly truth being is that; so will a new car – if you’re willing to look past the inherent quality of that relationship), spark a conversation at work that will land you a new friend or just a few admiring looks about town. And perhaps, just perhaps, that admiration will do a heck of a lot more for you than an talking head, acting your conscience, asking the question: “And just why do you think that is?”

(Right about here, I hear the whitewashed chamber choir of social media savvies cry out against the word “manipulate”, however, scrutinising the process; it remains the main objective – pretty manifestos, social media camps and other exotic highbrowery notwithstanding).

The infinite amount of status updates, tweets-retweets, largely unfounded and undigested flow of uninterrupted information poses three main problems. One, since every social media entry is by definition egodriven, then recycled – it will be hard to create any lasting credibility as the information goes through the replication process (losing value by every egodriven retweet). Two, as argued by CUCUMATZ, whenever a corporation creates an online persona, it fails to use the inherent power of its own preexisting networks – diluting the brand image in the process (thus following the target audience deviation trajectory of any successful brand). Three, the modern father of nonsensical information transfer, Jeff Koons, will (presumably) be proud to know that social media messages largely follow the aesthetics of transfer, aswell. Meaning: the way in which the message is relayed seems to be superior in importance to the actual content of that same message.

Whenever one or several of the above problems occur on their own or combined, the end result of communication relayed via the social scene creates a form a digital scar tissue that not only threatens to overthrow the message itself but also adds to the problem of controlling the credibility of content, a major issue for any brand or corporation. Modern gurus will tell you that it is an inherent factor of the social game and beyond any real circumstance save the fact that it “probably will occur”. In other words, internet professionals are trying to magick their customers into thinking that flawed communication using the social scene is better than letting the scene construct its own reality – tweet by tweet eroding away at the single remaning tool of any brand aspiring towards longevity and profit – credibility.

The organisational infostream is to reduced to a near-alchemical process where input gets stuffed into the leaden jar at one end and coming out as discolored confetti in the other. I’m not saying that organisations should stay out of engaging into online conversations. Quite the contrary. Make sure you actually have something to say, then say it using your own existing network.

There are however further problems with communicating in social media fashion. As Paul Virilio argued, the (modern) speed with which we communicate induces a state of confusion. And as classical philosophy puts it (dispensing with the ideal state of Plato), we exist in the manner of us being here and now, Hic et nunc. That might very well have worked for nearly two thousand years. Our current here and now however is split in so many facets and can via status updates, online presences and other digital tracks set us in so many here’s and now’s that the classical notion of existing becomes not only flawed but borderline ridiculous. You are your tweet and your status update. Or are you the comment on your status update? Or are you the construct path of your cellular phone record? And just what were you when the two lanes of information intersected?

The same notion of accelerating confusion will apply to any brand or corporation entering the social media circus. Further disambiguation follows loss of control and credibility. Who is the corporation hijacked on the information slipstream? Tweet with care, fellow brands – perhaps it will turn out that the best medicine against a digital motion sickness is slowing things down in order to evaluate what actually needs to be said and what value this will add to the community, if any.

A circus is so easily transformed into a freakshow.

The quotation: “You come to, amongst the wreckage of your own making (…)”, suggests that most humans aren’t able to autocorrect faults but need this lengthy self-educative process. But how many feelings are hurt this way and how much could we have saved our loved ones if we were to step up on the ladder of realisation every now and then.

Much younger, I wrote the sentence: “We have to constantly wait by bridges in order to love one another”. Fifteen years down the line I’m finally figuring out what that really meant. Why couldn’t have I just understood it there and then?