Eventing Yourself, Part 1
I enjoy Brad Berens’ Mediavorous blog because, well, he’s Brad Berens and Brad often makes me think and I enjoy that experience. Often Brad and I think about the same things from different paradigms. He recently posted “The Perils of the Pause Button”. That title may be misleading because what Brad’s really right about is eventness, “…seeing stories — films, plays, TV shows — with other people.” Brad has more than one post on this and they’re worth a read.
I’ve been researching the same thing from a different place. I’m not so much interested in the eventness of seeing stories with other people, I’m much more curious about people who are eventing themselves, turning their very act of being into something beyond their very act of being.
I’ll start by writing that words fascinate me. Especially when the same word has such disparate meanings and I don’t mean “bad” being used to mean “something good or desireable”. I’m talking about something like “affair”.
Eventing Yourself, Part 2
I remember, when I was a child, listening to my parents talking about an uncle who was having an affair. I had no idea what they were talking about except that whatever an affair was, it wasn’t a good thing. About a month or so later several members of my extended family were sitting around my grandmother’s kitchen table. Neither grandma nor grandpa were there. The adults were talking about having an affair for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Everybody seemed in favor of it. This was a good thing. So I, child that I was, said in a typically loud child’s voice and using words I didn’t understand but that my parents used, “How come it’s okay for grandma and grandpa to have an affair but not for Uncle Pip and that office floozie?”
Did I mention that Uncle Pip and my dad’s sister, Uncle Pip’s wife, Aunt Josie were also sitting at the table?
Eventing Yourself, Part 3
The word “event” seems to be going through such a transition right now. It use to mean “You can’t miss this!” and now, as Brad notes, there’s so much information demanding our attention that everything is screaming “You can’t miss this”. Like so much else these days, the proliferation of information is causing an inflation in eventing and their meaning in the social networks that (advertisers hope) drives them.
I agree with Brad’s thoughts and writings on “eventness”. I’ve also seen a rise in what I call “eventing”, the demonstration of oneself as something more than oneself. Often I talk about “not believing your own hype” and that plays into it. We have “the movie event of the year” “the media event of the year” “the awards event of the year”. Pick the one you like.
Eventing Yourself, Part 4
Eventing oneself isn’t new and I’d be surprised if no one else has written about this. Whenever someone wants to make an impression, they create an event around the impression they want to make. The person who’s perpetually late to things is eventing their entrance. The individual who’s …oh, I don’t know…intentionally drawing attention to themselves is eventing.
Military folks who stage a grand march when they enter a city are eventing.
Politicians who make sure there’s a good crowd when they appear somewhere are eventing.
Movie people who do something out little out of the ordinary to promote a new movie are eventing.
I, thinking I have something worthwhile to write in this blog, am eventing.
Anybody get caught short at that one? It’s true. I wrote way back in the beginning of this blog that I didn’t think I really had much to offer readers. I still don’t. It truly seems to be a compendium of “what’s interesting to Joseph right now?” and I’m flattered that readers and more and more companies are also interested in what interests me.
Eventing Yourself, Finale
Events are ways we create attention, ways we attempt to create a buzz about what we’re doing or what we think needs to get done. The web has made this incredibly easy and this intersects with Brad’s thoughts on the subject.
Anybody remember when webcams first came out? Anybody remember the shock and outrage associated with some of those “most downloaded on the internet” news stories? Now, who cares? I doubt if anybody notices. The recent SuperBowl was “the media event of the year” until the next one comes along — media event, not year.
And from that media event, people with webcams created their own SuperBowl events. People with cellphones took pictures and broadcast them. Mini-events, if you will, and still events to those who paid attention to them.
And if nobody’s reading this, it’s time for me to re-event myself…
Welcome, everyone, to our third 
Yo!