Shower Thought 🚿 #6 — The Age of Professionals
“Everything you post on social media impacts your personal brand. How do you want to be known?” — Lisa Horn a.k.a. The Publicity Gal
Let’s start with a simple sentence:
If you can cook a delicious dish, does that makes you a chef?Have you ever cook in your life? Make a dish straight out of your kitchen — your recipe, your style. That can happen cause people have access to gas, kitchenware, and ingredients — makes it easy to cook in your own house. But that doesn’t necessarily make them a chef, which is a professional in terms of culinary skills. It’s the same phenomenon as with what’s happening in this digital era.
Digitalization creates an easiness for people to reach out to something. Nowadays, we can make videos and insert “directed by me” at the credit titles. A certain app is hyping on dance trends and suddenly everybody’s a “dancer”. Does that mean I’m a writer (professionally speaking) just because I wrote a bunch of stuff in Medium? I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t go that way.
You’re not automatically becoming a director just because you make a simple video. It takes a lot more effort to gain the title, it takes years of experience and lots of concepts to study. When you put your thoughts into words on Medium, it doesn’t turn you into a writer. I’ve lost count of how many “dancers” I’ve seen on Tiktok doing dances with weird limb movements that make me cringe so much.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the idea of they’re doing what they want or love to do. I know that they’re just having fun. In fact, I support them. I think everyone should have the freedom of expressing themselves, much like what I do in writing this story. What I oppose is the idea of they easily gaining such a high title, just because they’re doing a job description of a certain profession.
It’s the age of professionals where the definitions of a job role seem to be applicable for everyone, regardless of their knowledge background. “Wow, you’re a Youtube. You must be able to direct a film” or “I’m a dancer. I dance on Tiktok”. They can easily get the title if they have simply done a good job which is not wrong.
Calling them “names” seems to overestimate and at the same time, undermine the profession itself. “Content creator” is more of a suitable term. They’re just creating content casually. Note that casual is different from professional. Although, I have to admit — several people are worthy of the title because of their skill, even tho they don’t have the educational background.
It’s the age of professionals where everyone can easily be anything. The ease of access has allowed people to try things, to become something. But it also creates this illusion of self-capability to oneself where we could consider ourselves to be a professional — while in reality, we’re far from it. Or on some occasions get the acknowledgment we deserved cause blood and sweat we put into it.
