Fragments: #WorkingOutLoud as Belief System

Today i’m sharing some fragments of writing i’ve done elsewhere this week, mainly about the idea of #WorkingOutLoud being both a belief system as well as methodology. This is the subject i’m exploring in the doctorate, which i hope to complete this summer. Note that these are fragments of writing, not a coherent whole!

Writing about how our ‘beliefs’ spread:

“This reminds me of how people describe their religious belief : it cannot, ultimately, be evidenced or shared, except through the narrative of their journey. And hence it is not ‘real’ in the sense that a book is. But still it acts upon them. And perhaps, through their stories, it acts upon me too. This is why i reference #WorkingOutLoud as a social movement, in that it permeates and catches like a wave.”

And this piece on how we ‘find our voice’

“There is perhaps a parallel with how an artist ‘discovers’ their voice: it may not be visible within a specific work (although a specific work may act as an exemplar of their discovered style). Rather we may see it in a career retrospective, something that in hindsight can present a coherent narrative of what may have been at the time a journey of confusion, frustration, poverty and failure. Or we may see the establishment of a school or genre, where others take their work as both inspiration, and defining texture. Or possibly use their work to boundary the space.”

Here i am considering the paradigm of the Social Age , and hence how it has enabled the system of #WorkingOutLoud as a system of identity as well as productivity:

“The Social Age presents a dramatically distributed information landscape, a radically interconnected social structure, and individualisation at scale. I will argue that this hence sets the conditions in which a methodology such as #WorkingOutLoud becomes a viable hermeneutic through which to view the development of self. Or alternatively that it becomes a viable system of being, parallel to legacy structures of career and codified power – in this sense a broadening of our landscape to permit new structures of habitation (‘influencers’, ‘thought leaders’, ‘independent thinkers’, all see a de-lamination of expertise and influence from structure and codified power).

This may lead us to classify #WorkingOutLoud as ‘philosophy’, ‘dogma’, ‘doctrine’, or ‘belief’, and perhaps it is some or all of those. It could even be a cult. Or it could be nothing: i’m inherently comfortable with this idea. Sometimes a schema of understanding is transient, the journey we make to a new location.”

Finally, this writing is about how ‘failure’ is inherent in #WorkingOutLoud, and how the boundary of ‘the public’ is pulled forwards:

“The notion that there is a terminal action inherent in creation is important: not work that is completed and then released, but that the incomplete work is put into the world. For me, it’s hitting ‘publish’, for him, it’s closing the kiln door. But for both of us there is a devolved act of judgement, under observation, and the notion that failure is inherent to the process. I write, ideas fail, i write again. I move on.

The observation of failure is a defining aspect of #WorkingOutLoud and i may argue differentiates it from legacy frames of creativity, in that it is not incidental to creation, but intrinsic to it. Gadsby’s videos of smashing his defective pots are amongst his most popular.”