Most certifications that are valid are like drivers’ licenses. You know how to operate a motor vehicle with minimal competence. What you do after that is up to you.

By the 4th-5th podcast they’ll be a black belt flinging ninja stars on TweetDeck and using impenetrable defenses like SocialMention.

Great analogy.

Your tune in tomorrow question was what I was going to ask, therefore, I’ll anxiously await tomorrow’s post. I do believe it is possible to become an expert very quickly, at least in this case, if you’re willing to put in the time it takes, as there’s so much information out there, it would be hard not to. At the same time, it looks like the problem is the same in social media as it is elsewhere, as it sounds like it’s easier to become an expert than it is to get your start.

My initial reaction is one of.. that social media is a lot of things to a lot of people.. that it has a quality of infinite granularity.. which gets configured into a “reality” by one's consciousness.. and from where I'm standing, an essential quality of social media is “creative content.”

The values that lead to creative genius, at least in my experience, are not inculcated via a master pupil relationship… rather they come from a lonely inward journey into the abyss.. The abyss in terms of the dark side of your own personal psyche… as well as the dark side in the sense of our collective psyche.

I suppose the part of the process where you leave your master is where the master pupil relationship inculcates the creative genius values…. or at least could potentially… depending on the courage of the pupil.

George Lucas was following Joseph Campbell with his Starwars saga… Campbell has done the job of mapping out this journey.

I've never had really had a master pupil relationships… though my inward adventures have supplied me with many mentors.. of which I count you as one. I imagine there is also a granularity underlying the master pupil relationship that has simply expressed it's self, in my life, in a different way..

I imagine what the master pupil relationship does supply you with is you're light saber.. but in the context of you're conversation.. the sorta master who can supply light sabers are not around…

or, there are plenty of light saber suppliers around.. but you have to think like Jay Moonah.. which is to say to think of social media as a kind of synthesis of formally disparate fields, so to speak… so one must look to the old fields, all be it with a critical eye.. a sorta Viveka process by which you differentiate things who's truth are limited to a temporal context which is different then the social media context's new synthesis… and those things that have a truth that is transcendent of there context.

My initial reaction is one of.. that social media is a lot of things to a lot of people.. that it has a quality of infinite granularity.. which gets configured into a “reality” by one's consciousness.. and from where I'm standing, an essential quality of social media is “creative content.”

The values that lead to creative genius, at least in my experience, are not inculcated via a master pupil relationship… rather they come from a lonely inward journey into the abyss.. The abyss in terms of the dark side of your own personal psyche… as well as the dark side in the sense of our collective psyche.

I suppose the part of the process where you leave your master is where the master pupil relationship inculcates the creative genius values…. or at least could potentially… depending on the courage of the pupil.

George Lucas was following Joseph Campbell with his Starwars saga… Campbell has done the job of mapping out this journey.

I've never had really had a master pupil relationships… though my inward adventures have supplied me with many mentors.. of which I count you as one. I imagine there is also a granularity underlying the master pupil relationship that has simply expressed it's self, in my life, in a different way..

I imagine what the master pupil relationship does supply you with is you're light saber.. but in the context of you're conversation.. the sorta master who can supply light sabers are not around…

or, there are plenty of light saber suppliers around.. but you have to think like Jay Moonah.. which is to say to think of social media as a kind of synthesis of formally disparate fields, so to speak… so one must look to the old fields, all be it with a critical eye.. a sorta Viveka process by which you differentiate things who's truth are limited to a temporal context which is different then the social media context's new synthesis… and those things that have a truth that is transcendent of there context.

My initial reaction is one of.. that social media is a lot of things to a lot of people.. that it has a quality of infinite granularity.. which gets configured into a “reality” by one's consciousness.. and from where I'm standing, an essential quality of social media is “creative content.”

The values that lead to creative genius, at least in my experience, are not inculcated via a master pupil relationship… rather they come from a lonely inward journey into the abyss.. The abyss in terms of the dark side of your own personal psyche… as well as the dark side in the sense of our collective psyche.

I suppose the part of the process where you leave your master is where the master pupil relationship inculcates the creative genius values…. or at least could potentially… depending on the courage of the pupil.

George Lucas was following Joseph Campbell with his Starwars saga… Campbell has done the job of mapping out this journey.

I've never had really had a master pupil relationships… though my inward adventures have supplied me with many mentors.. of which I count you as one. I imagine there is also a granularity underlying the master pupil relationship that has simply expressed it's self, in my life, in a different way..

I imagine what the master pupil relationship does supply you with is you're light saber.. but in the context of you're conversation.. the sorta master who can supply light sabers are not around…

or, there are plenty of light saber suppliers around.. but you have to think like Jay Moonah.. which is to say to think of social media as a kind of synthesis of formally disparate fields, so to speak… so one must look to the old fields, all be it with a critical eye.. a sorta Viveka process by which you differentiate things who's truth are limited to a temporal context which is different then the social media context's new synthesis… and those things that have a truth that is transcendent of there context.

There is a bit of a flip side to this which I don't think stands in opposition to anything you said but is worth considering. I had a great audio production prof, Michael, who was later my boss at Ryerson and is still a very good friend. One of the pieces of sound editing software we used at the time was called SAW. Now, I used to kid Michael about this all the time, but I know for a fact that he would regularly teach us features of the software that he had literally learned the day before. Part of the reason for this was that the upgrades were coming fast and furious so it actually served him best to wait on learning the new features ‘cus they literally might have changed the week before.

Now, Michael is a Jedi Master. And because he was and is a master, he could quickly contextualize the new features into things that he knew worked because of his vast experience in audio production. He didn’t necessarily need to be a master of the tool to teach it because he was already a master of what the tool was FOR.

My argument would be, there are indeed masters who USE social media tools for their practice. Podcasting is new, sure, but audio communication and recording is almost 100 years old. Although not all the techniques of old disciplines apply to the new ones, having mastered them can certainly give you a huge leg up.

Looking at new tool, understanding what it might be for, and then applying existing knowledge (like interviewing, writing or design skills for example) could, I believe, allow certain people to call themselves “experts” in disciplines that are otherwise very new.