MA Journalism ––– Print/Online Pathway
London College of Communication
Portfolio for Application:
— Agatha Justino
MA Journalism ––– Print/Online Pathway
London College of Communication
Portfolio for Application:
— Agatha Justino
The following arcticles were published at Administradores.com and the maganize Administradores.
About Administradores.com The Administradores is the biggest website about business and administration written in portuguese, it has become a reference in Brazil to professionals and students in this area. We have an audience of 3 million visists per month, 445 thousand fans on Facebook and 100 thousand fans on Twitter and 300 thousand members. Besides the website and the magazine, available online and for free, this year, we launched a TV channel on YouTube.
down with perfect professio
Consulting, literature and business
magazines helped to create the illusion
of the professional everyone would like to be. It is time for administrators to
revise these concepts and get rid of the fantasies that have dominated our area. —
By Agatha Justino http://issuu.com/admnews/docs/adm23issuu/36
t onal
He has a formal vocabulary, is wordy and spits business jargon when decides to express an idea. In his wardrobe, fancy suits, polished shoes and a tie that he acquired after reading some article about how to dress like a successful entrepreneur. On his shelf hundreds of books that mix management and self-help, exploring to exhaustion words like “dream”, “success” and “leadership”. We can say that our character has a PhD in the secrets of leadership used by some historical figures, knowing all the tricks used by Jesus Christ, Madonna and Donald Trump to be loved by the crowds. He would like to be our perfect professional, but ended up becoming just another one struggling to survive in the business jungle. To move up in their career, many professionals dived into this material called “pop management” by Thomaz Wood Jr., business professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas and autor of the book “Abaixo o pop management” (Down with pop management – in english). According to Wood, “pop management” emerged in the 90’s with the consulting firms, business schools and business media. “This phenomenon created a lucrative space for new management ideas, which were not always interesting ideas. Those were recipes to get rich, to win some competition and to be successful with their career. The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the ideas of the writer and his audience. It’s sad”, said Wood.
Among the problems, highlighted by the professor, that resulted in the explosion of the pop management, we can consider the lack of management that exists today in Brazil. Mr. Wood says that our corporations, regardless of the size, are poorly managed. He insists that the services have bad quality and our companies are suffering from low productivity and competitiveness. These failures, according to him, are responsable for creating an objective reason for people to seek alternatives to better understand their careers, whether self-help books or management gurus, which then become references in the area, real celebrities of the business. “The knowledge that we have in management (finances, operations, marketing, human resources and other areas) has increased in last decades. However, many professionals are still following the self-help pathway. In fact, our publishers are offering a lot of books that contain a magical solution for one’s career. This kind of literature is made to reduce the anxiety of the professionals, but they don’t have any effect on their reality”, explains Mr. Wood. “To improve the administration’s quality and to stop working 12 hours per day, we need strong effort and hard work, this doesn’t come in the blink of an eye”, said the professor. Silvia Generali, business teacher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, agrees that the explosion of this type of literature is related to the comercial aspect. She explains that the plublishers, bookstores and even the business academy are depending on those new tendencies of management. To Generali, all those new theories, even if they are not interesting, create a strong impression that the business field is renewing. “The publishing industry, consultants and teachers are comfortable in assuming that an evolution is happening in the area. On the other hand, we have a
point of view based on basic assumptions: theories of human capital and employability, where each is responsible for its own development. Here, each person manages their own product, which is itself”, said Generali. In addition to this, Generali believes that our young professionals are suffering from a particular pressure: a generation problem. “There is an aspect that we can’t deny: the psychology of our era. People feel uncomfortable accepting their problems. We live in a world that professionals are led to believe that if they follow some handbook they become winners, unbeatables and perfect, which is not true.”, explains the teacher. In the meantime, this obsession about being the perfect professional is leading people to frustration. “What we say is that sometimes, to do a good job, a person needs to throw the manuals away. Some companies, nowadays, are born without a handbook. They prefer to build a relation of partnership with their employees. The rules are created by the group, according to each project’s needs. Instead of a handbook, those companies have strong values and a clear mission”, states Generali. We, from Administradores Magazine, are willing to debunk the main rules of the perfect professional handbook. “What we say is that there isn’t the perfect person. What does exist is a person who is qualified to work in a determinated company. They might be good in one function and terrible in another one. It’s necessary to find out what each company really needs. If the company can recognize an essential feature of that person, everything else can be developed”, concludes Generali. So, let’s tear apart the myths of management. In four simple steps.
Work and grow rich “Never trust on the advice of a person whose only business is to provide advice,” alerts Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown University. Newport explains that many consultants are making money just for giving the easiest and the most dangerous advice that exists: “follow your passions”. This is the first myth absorved by our professionals. According to his research, this advice helped creating a generation of frustrated young professionals. “Follow your passions is a slogan that started to call people’s attention in the 80’s. This got spread quickly and in several parts of the world. Today, many young people believe that this is the best advice, without questioning it. They don’t think why this is a good career strategy and if can really be put into practice”, says Newport. His work, entitled “Solving Generation Y’s passion problem” showed that this group grew up during a period when the advice “follow your passions” penetrated society. Different from the generation before them, a generation that searched for estability, who grow up during the east decade was motivated to dream about the perfect job. But, what is the problem with that? Well, according to Newport, the expression implies that people must build a career after identifying a passion that can be turned into a job. People are led to believe that passion should come before work and they must love what they do from the first day of work, and that just is not what happens. “When I reasearch this question for my recent book, I found out that ‘follow your passions’, as a career strategy, can actually with decrease the chances of being happy at work. If you study people who are satisfied their careers, you’re going to realize that for getting there, they went through a much more complex and interesting path”, states the professor. For Newport, it’s rare to meet someone who in fact loves his career, without becoming really good at it, before. Experience generates engaging features such as respect, impact and autonomy, but the process of becoming very good at something requires a lot of time and can be really hard. “People who love what they do, built that with years of hard work and development. When they started to control their functions, they started to feel passion for their career”, concludes Newport.
Who moved my leader? Another corporative fantasy is the one which crowns the leader as the main hero of the company. According to Silvia Generali, leaders were always overrated by history. Those characters were always introduced to us as unbeatable and fearless. She explains that this irrealistic profile is transmited to young professional, as role model. The professor states that many leaders assume the behaviour of Hollywood stars, acting as business celebrities. Well, she believes that those types are living on borrowed time. “The tendency here is to divide the leadership and the power to make decisions between all the members of the company’s team. Here, the leader is not the star of the firm anymore. His work become more focused on the development of the staff, so that each reach their maximum potential. He is the one who shares the glory with his co-workers. In fact, he can even be compared to a star, but surrounded by several others, and his function is to ensure that everyone is shining” concludes Generali. Thomaz Wood Jr. also agrees that this leadership model based on hierarchies and business celebrites is fated to failure. According to him, the leadership must combine entrepreneurship and managerial skills. “We are looking
for a sum of values and styles in the matter of leadership. On one side we have the bureaucrats, on the other the entrepreneurs, who are especially young people. But we also have to bump into the celebrities, the ones who can easily manipulate image and speech to their advantage. We also have leaders who are there just filling a status position and don’t have the freedom to play this role. I believe that the concept of leadership is over. It still works for selling books and courses, but in the end, the human interections are getting on another road”, says the professor. The strategy is to reinvent the role of the leader in the company. Combining the qualities of different types of leaders. Leaving aside the “star quality leader”. “We’ve be living for 40 years, as a french thinker pointed out, in the society of the spectacle. We can’t be innocents: there is no escape. But we don’t need to bow down to bad theater. In many companies, the distance between image and substance, between the picture and the facts is so strong that it generates a permanent state of cynicism in the workforce. It’s better to fight against this situation, before we become full-time actors, who never take off the mask”, states Thomaz Wood Jr.
The coach Good coaches are able to make companies rise, organize entire departments and influence the team’s behaviour. The success of these professionals, however, led several people to believe that becoming a consultant was an easy task and, thus, there was a multiplication of these kind of professionals - many selling illusions and small talk to their clients. The popularity given to those bad consultants can be attributed, among many factors, to the easy answers they provide to the problems faced by companies. In an article published in the Harvard Business Review site, the psychiatrist Steven Berglas, head of Harvard Medical School, wrote this theory explaining that executives became dependents of those methods, simply because people, in general, are always looking for ways to develop themselves, but they want this to happen in a fast and painless process. This necessity creates the perfect environment for the growth of self-help books and poor consultants, who willing to sell the illusion that you can be the next Steve Jobs in 12 simple steps.
Berglas explains that the excess of fast solutions left psychotherapy marginalized. “To reach fast results, many executives started to adopt intervention methods used by sportists, methods that leave introspective processes aside, because they require time to be applied. The idea that a coach can improve team’s performance is great for CEOs, but it may intensify internal conflicts between the employees. Instead of helping, those actions can actually do harm to the company. The study points out that business environments are becoming more and more complex. So companies are seeking the help of consultants. Those professionals should be retired CEOs, academics and policymakers. However, our consultants are mainly managers and average entrepreneurs with little knowledge in psychology and human resources. “This type of consulting became popular in recent years, as companies faced a shortage of talent and were concerned about turnover among key employees. Companies wanted a sign of commitment to develop their executives, so they hired consultants”, said Berglas. To Cal Newport, this lack of experience, that drive us to seek for consultants, is another reason for frustration in the market, along with many others. “We live this weird and experimental moment, where the professionals just don’t know how to deal with their own careers. We raised the number of communication resources, but we’re still unable to make simple decisions. Profissionals are capturing information like human routers, but this doesn’t generate useful knowledge for their real job”, concludes Berglas.
Rich MBA, Poor MBA With the ambition of becoming great executives before reaching their 30’s, people are naturally investing in their resumes. They know that in order to conquer a space at the big companies, they need to be from a well known University, they need to learn several languages and dive into extra-curricular activities. Despite all the efforts, nothing seems enough until they have their MBA in hand. In the search for the ideal MBA, students can find enriching courses that can boost their knowledge base and skills. But MBA are growing on trees and students find MBAs that are nothing, but just initials on a piece of paper or a matter of status. It’s about those poor programs that we need to talk about. Professor Thomaz Wood Jr., says that MBAs are a global phenomenon. They started to appear more than a century ago in the United States, but got spread around the world after the 90’s. He explains that in Brazil the acronym was adopted a very free way, so that all types of courses, and qualified in terms of market, can be considered an MBA. “There are two main critics to this model: the first is that the impact of these programs on the careers of students is decreasing. The second one is that those programs are creating professionals focused on maximizing the short-term results of the companies, but are insensitive to social issues and blind the long term actions. Naturally, there are good MBAs and bad MBAs: the quality of programs is very heterogeneous”, says Wood. Before enrolling, a student must assess the institution and ensure if the program provides the level of knowledge he seeks. This can be measured by means of the faculty, the selection criteria and if the college is connected with the market needs. One of the biggest critics of MBAs, the canadian professor Henry Mintzberg, of McGill
University, emphasizes that these programs are also selling illusions. He says that they are making believe that it’s possible to create managers in classrooms. “Putting young people in school and pretending you’re turning them into managers is dangerous because they think that by having MBAs, they will be able to manage organizations. However, what they learn is solely to examine administrative functions such as marketing and finance. Thus, MBAs are great to teach exactly that – which, however, is not managed. It is worth these tools, but it is much, much more than the analysis of administrative functions”, explains Mintzberg. According to Mintzberg, management development must be focused on real managers. Also, they should use the experience in management to build a personal and group reflection. By this, the professional will be able to learn from his own living, thinking about it and sharing with his colleagues. It’s about learning from each other, not only from teachers. Instead of betting on instant theories and practical solutions that look simpler than a Noodles’ recipe, companies should focus on creating a healthy work environment, a place to develop skills and make professionals work better, with the main goal being to retain these talents. The myth of the perfect professional is not only dangerous to young professionals, but also to the companies that insist on creating the perfect team. After recruting a group of good professionals, they realize that they don’t have the ideal space for their aspirations and dreams, so they end up losing those talents to another company. Other organizations believe that hiring any consultant they will be able to improve productivity, motivate the team, raise the income and other miracles. It’s not that easy. Professionals are motivated by the values they acquire within companies.
interview:
the twitter revolution HENRY JENKINS —
By Agatha Justino http://issuu.com/admnews/docs/admn22_digital/10
r n
During the Confederation’s Cup, the brazilian people were not only worried about the gold medal. Actually, instead of cheering for the country’s victory they were on the streets fighting for better public services. Who was there, participating on the riots, filmed and took photos of the protests. This material was posted on the internet and social medias at the same time that people were protesting on the streets. Who wasn’t there, shared this pictures and videos on Facebook and Twitter, finding a way to spread the word of the movements. This type of activism has a name: participative culture. This method was present on Occuppy Wall Street. To understand this phenomenom, we spoke with Henry Jenkins, professor at the University of Southern California and ex-director of media studies at Massaschessets Institute of Technology.
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Mr. Jenkins, last month Brazil faced, during the Confederation Cup, several protests and social movements. It started after a group of young people decided to protest against the bus fare. They were repressed by the police with violence. The images and videos of this repression ran through the internet and people started to go to the streets to fight back. How far can the participative culture go on social movements?
As someone from the United States, I am reluctant to try to comment too directly on the specifics of what has happened in your country. My research team at the University of Southern California is following these events fairly closely but the information we get here is very fragmentary and does not provide us with the full cultural and political context. But, we can understand at least some dimensions of these events in terms of developments that have been occurring around the world over the past few years. We need to first push back on the idea that this is a “Twitter revolution,” as critics might want to frame it. These concerns do not begin online; the protests are not conducted exclusively online. I talk about these contemporary movements as being conducted through “any media necessary,” a phrase that plays on Malcolm X’s “By any means necessary.” By this we mean that contemporary political movements are using any and all available channels of communication to spread their message, to recruit and mobilize their members, and to negotiate for political change. Sometimes this involves social media; sometimes video sharing; sometimes graphic posters and comics; sometimes live demonstrations; sometimes knocking on people’s doors or calling them on the telephone. Digital media has simply expanded the range of available media through which we conduct politics. That said, worldwide, we are seeing more and more grassroots protest movements taking shape. And to some degree, this has to do with a dramatic expansion in terms of the access of everyday people to the means of cultural production and circulation, in terms of the ability to form networks and move ideas from one geographically local community to another. These movements also reflect raising expectations brought about by expanding communication capacities and promises of greater participation in decision making that have gone hand in hand with the growth of new media. We know from history that uprisings take place not when conditions are worse, but when people begin to imagine the possibility for change. And around the world, the shifts in the media environment and the rhetoric of participation has resulted in increased hopes for change that are being expressed right now by people taking to the streets – whether Occupy or the Arab Spring or what’s happening in Brazil.
Can you give us a panaroma of projects created by young people, that are changing our status quo?
I am working as part of a multidisciplinary research group, brought together by the MacArthur Foundation, which has sought to better understand what we are calling participatory politics. Our
M Still regarding the movements in Brazil, they are accused of being unfoccused and ephemeral. How can we sustaint this revolution using participative culture and collective intelligence? When you say that the revolution will be hashtagged, how can we assure that?
central focus is on youth, especially those who may be entering political and civic life for the first time. My team is focused right now on U.S. based examples, though other researchers in the larger network – especially MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman – are taking a more transnational perspective. Our working definition of participatory politics is ““interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” Such practices might take a variety of different forms – from mashing up images to create a “meme” to editing footage to share via YouTube, from writing a blog to updating a community about key developments through Facebook and Twitter. It might involve passing along a ready-made video as happened when Invisible Children spread Kony 2012 to almost 100 million people in a week by asking people to share it with their networks of friends. But, it might also involve creating and circulating an underground comic or painting graffiti under a bridge. And that’s what I mean when I say that these young people are using any and all media at their disposal – not simply focusing their efforts through a single platform. What these all have in common, though, is that they involve young people creating something, doing something, that directly expresses how they feel about an issue. They are not spectators or followers; they are participants. And that means they have a very different relationship with elite institutions, with the gatekeepers and agenda setters who ruled politics in the past. This is one of the challenges of the current moment in participatory politics. A similar charge has been leveled against many of the groups that we study. These movements are not hierarchical; they do not have firmly established leaders or spokespeople. Again, they are mass rather than elite movements. They often are shaped by broadly defined agendas rather than a fixed list of demands. Often, their goals are discursive: that is, they want to change how we think and act, rather than pass specific laws. So, the Occupy movement sought to focus attention on the problem of economic inequalities, broadly defined, and its greatest impact may have been to put the 1%-99% frame into broader circulation. In the U.S., we saw those ideas get picked up by all kinds of political figures in the last Presidential election: in many ways, this was the ground upon which we decided to return Obama to office as opposed to Romney. And you
may anticipate these more diffused effects emerging from the Brazillian protests. Clearly, in your case, you are seeing governments – local, state, and national – respond to specific concerns – the bus rates – but also general feelings – worries about corruption, a desire to see a different set of priorities governing the society, a need for new mechanisms for popular involvement in decision making. But there is still a lot we do not understand in examples around the world about the long-term consequences of these movements: do they result in instability which gets filled by more traditional kinds of authorities, as has arguably happened in the wake of some of the Arab Spring uprisings? Do they exert more power to negate policies than to frame new ones, as would seem to be true with the example of the Tea Party in the United States? Do mass media and political parties still have a greater capacity to frame issues than grassroots movements, as seems to have been part of the downfall of the Occupy movement? When we look more intently at those movements we can observe the presence of pop culture on a big scale. We see signs with “The winter is coming”, as joke with Game of Thrones, we see V Masks and people bringing the zombies to fight over better social services. How is this media; this pop culture, is shaping our political participation?
This is a global phenomenon. More and more, our politics is being conducted through the language of popular culture. What we’ve heard through our interviews in the U.S. is that young people find the traditional language of politics to be exclusive (in that it is conducted in an insider language that may not make sense unless you are already initiated) and repulsive (in that it is framed by partisan divides which make it hard to arrive at consensus). The goal is to create a new language for politics which is informal, engaging, everyday, and which takes advantage of shared frameworks that people already understand. Not surprisingly, then, young people are finding shared metaphors from popular culture effective at achieving these goals. They often work by drawing parallels between popular content worlds – in your examples, Game of Thrones, V for Vendetta, The Walking Dead – and real world social concerns. This is explicitly the case with some examples of fan activism we’ve identified – the Harry Potter Alliance in the U.S. uses the fantasy novels to rally concerns around human rights, the Hunger Games has been used to increase awareness of poverty and hunger, and Avatar has been a rallying point for the rights of indigenous peoples. It is also the case that these young activists have learned how to produce media by filming skate board videos, by remixing their favorite films and television shows, and they are extending these practices into the activism, often starting with the same raw materials. And in
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some parts of the world, their first experiences in challenging authority might be circumventing local censorship mechanisms in order to get access to pop music or games through the internet. So, for these youth, remixing popular culture is centrally connected to their political identities and practices. You say that convergence is an old concept that has gained new meanings. How has this convergence worked in the past, with less technology?
If you want to understand how convergence has historically worked in Brazil, go to the Favelas, go to the Samba Schools. These are strong informal communities that collaborate in the production of grassroots media – the whole spectacle of Carnival with its music, its costumes, its floats, its storytelling – all takes shape in these social spaces where young and old, veterans and newcomers, are learning from each other, building on each other’s ideas, and deploying whatever skills they have to create shared joy. Go to the beaches, where you see sand sculptors crafting these elaborate representations that often take their subject matter from the culture around them – from popular culture, folk culture, contemporary politics, history. Look at the graffiti that I see everywhere when I visit Rio: often with beautiful and distinctive graphic styles and again, with diverse sources of content. Now, imagine, an idea traveling across those different sites and practices, an idea that might unite the multicultural diversity of Brazil, that might speak to each of these groups in the language that is most meaningful and engaging to them. That’s the potential for convergence you have in your country.
Which changes can we expect with this new participative behaviour? Do you believe that new media and old media are about to collide or are they going to find a way to coexist?
Both. Certainly, we are seeing mass media producers and Web 2.0 companies struggle to find ways by which they may profit from the unleashing of this expanded creative and civic capacity: they want to find ways to commodify and profit from our collective desire to participate. And to some degree, they may succeed in so far as they show true leadership, which in this case means figuring out where the crowd is moving and then run around in front and shout, “follow me.” :-) More seriously, they will sometimes find ways to be more responsive to specific segments of the population and they also need to find more openended processes which will allow them to discover new markets and engage with new publics. But, there is also going to be some ongoing tension. The logics of mass media were set up to be one-directional, designed for a world where some produced and most consumed culture, and they are not going to be
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able to satisfy a public with a growing expectation about their capacity to reshape the agenda and participate in the decision-making. Right now, there’s a lot of sorting out taking place, as we are learning how to be more informed and more skeptical about the difference between the promises for participation being made by companies and the reality being experienced by those of us using those platforms. I think we can anticipate ongoing pushes for greater participation, but there’s going to be lots of heated debates around the terms of our participation.
Our fan culture has been growing and impacting the traditional culture. They are not just consumers, they want to be creative agents. Why has it taken so long for the studios to realize the power of fandom? What`s the major difference between a fan-created content from the ‘former audience’?
Within fandom itself, there’s often a distinction drawn between “affirmational” and “transformative” forms of fandom. Affirmational fandom is what the industry has historically embraced: fans who consume and celebrate what the industry creates, where-as Transformational Fandom is what they have resented – people who use the industry’s products as the raw materials for their own expressive activities. I think we are starting to break down the lines between the two. I know industry leaders used to say to me that they wanted to distinguish between the fans and the pirates, and I would argue that there was no such firm distinction possible: the fans are the pirates (though we do not want to ever reduce the full range of their activities to piracy). The fans were the ones who were taking their content and allowing it to spread across the culture, giving it new life and new meaning through their creative contributions. The fans are the ones, say, who have helped media from Japan or India get much greater visibilities in the America’s. The fans are the ones who have helped children and young adult books, such as Harry Potter, Twilight, or the Hunger Games, find an adult readership. The fans are the ones who have helped take cult media properties, such as Lost or The Walking Dead, and bring them to a much more diverse public. And they have done so not by simply writing fan letters, but by creating online resources discussing and debating what they are seeing, writing fan fiction, editing fan videos, performing fan music, and so forth. We are seeing more and more media producers valuing those contributions, though there is still a strong tendency to seek to control them (because they are also still feared rather than celebrated in many quarters). These groups are often pushing the borders of what the studios can or will accept – more open, say, about themes of gender, race, and sexuality than are found in dominant media constructions.
And now that they realize that, how do you know that they are using this powerful and strong community of fans?
Let me give two recent examples of the ways companies are recognizing and trying to respond to this fan power. The first would be Kickstarter, where we saw the producers of Veronica Mars raise a large chunk of the money needed to produce a new movie in a single day by appealing directly to their fans. We are seeing more and more independent media producers follow a similar path, courting their supporters while the film is still at the concept stage, and working with their prospective audience to create something that will be received enthusiastically when it is released. The second would be Amazon which has launched a new Content Worlds initiative which would allow fan fiction authors, focused on some specific media franchises, to publish their works commercially and to get a share of the returns. This second is controversial amongst fans, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it creates a way for amateur writers to bridge into the professional sphere – mechanisms for doing so historically existed within the male science fiction fan world, but were often closed for women. On the other, these official contents impose limits on what can be done with the characters, especially what themes can be explored, and many of us worry that the producers may go after “unauthorized forms” of fan fiction as a consequence of having created an enclosure where some forms are accepted. But, whatever the long term impact, Amazon’s decisions here represent the growing recognition within the industry that fans are a powerful creative force within contemporary culture.
What we see today is that many brands, movies, artists and books are able to create an feeling of fanatisism. People connect with the stories and products, not only as individuals, but as communities. What does it take for a product to become so loved? What does a brand have to do to get this loyalty? What are the aspects of these “affective economics?”
We explore these themes much more fully in my newest book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, which I coauthored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green and is currently being translated into Portuguese. This book starts from the basic premise that “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead,” and explores what has happened as the public is playing a much more active role in shaping the circulation of media. We find that the media that gets spread is the media that allows people to speak to each other about things that matter to them, the media that can get inserted as a resource into existing conversations, as opposed to, say, media that wants to make itself the center of the conversation. In terms of traditional fan communities, we discover that the stories that develop the most intense fan followings often deal explicitly with themes of friendship and community: fans consume these stories collectively, and they use them to talk about
what these communities mean to them. These are the stories that fans – especially women and young people – want to rewrite and want to extend. They are stories that take them seriously and that they in turn take serious. They are often stories that place a strong stress on personal and collective agency – on the potential to change the world. They offer clear goals and roles for their protagonists and by extension, they model how communities make work together to more fully achieve their hopes and dreams. What can business learn from the participative cultures? Mostly, you wrote about what they can learn with Samba Schools, what are those lessons or video games, for exemple?
The first step is to recognize that producers and consumers want different things from these relationships. The early writing on Web 2.0 implies that there could be an easy or simple alignment of interests between these groups. Many companies start from the premise that they can build a fan community around their franchise or a brand community around their brand, assuming we are simply waiting around to embrace what they produce. If we build it, they will come. But you can’t create these communities. Most of them have a long history, have their own traditions and practices, their own values and norms, and if you want to attract them, you have to respect those communities and understand what they want to get out of these kinds of relationships. Game companies certainly were early in understanding the need to work with their fan communities: they were working in a medium that embraced interactivity, but they also quickly saw the value of empowering consumers to mod their games, to construct and perform their own identities, to form online communities around their content. They gave the Guilds in World of Warcraft the tools they needed to find each other, communicate with each other, and coordinate their activities. They allowed artists around The Sims or Little Big Planet to trade what they created with each other. And from there, other entertainment producers are already learning a great deal about what it might mean to partner with the audience in building out an entertainment franchise.
what I learned about persever— ance at th driving sc
d
Failing several times at
something can always teach a lesson. In my case, I was just
trying to get a driver’s license, but I ended it up wiser. —
By Agatha Justino http://issuu.com/admnews/docs/adm20web/46
— he chool
A
Perseverance: a word repeated in the Bible and motivational books. You can hear it from the mouth of successful people or read it in a fortune cookie. After some setbacks, we get used to hearing “be perseverant” as advice, but truth be told: nobody wants to fail and when this happens several times, the feeling that you’re not acting right can drive anyone crazy. At this point, hearing the old “keep trying” just seems useless. Failure can come in different forms, dimensions and times. You can see it in that friend who is trying to pass a hard exam for a long time. Or the co-worker who does her best to lose weight, but seems to got nowhere. Or even someone who dreams about opening his own business, but there is always some obstacle gettin on his way. People will say: if you want to pass the exams, study harder; If want to get thinner, work out move and less eating; If you want to be an entrepreneur, leave your job and build a business plan. But even who give such advice, know that it’s not as easy as it seems. And someone who failed six times at the driving exam, like me, sure can tell. I started my epic journey into getting my drive is license when I was 18th (age a person is allowed to drive in Brazil), and I had no idea what to expect. I thought that getting my permision to drive, would be as simple as it was for my family and friends. In three months I would be saying goodbye to all the bad public transport available in my country. Well, four years later, I was still at the bus stop.
The exams were divided in three parts: psycological, theorical lessons and tests where I would learn about traffic laws, mechanics and defensive driving. In the third phase, I took 14 pratical lessons, which according to Sandro, my instructor, would be enough. He used to pick me up every morning so we could practice the three challenges of the Traffic Department: half-clutch, beacon and, finally, garage. I remember at the time, they kept repeating to me that in times of trial, if I did not obey the STOP sign, the reproach was automatic. Easy! I Would not forget it. I was excited and seemingly nothing could go wrong. Apparently.
At first I went onto the wrong road and hit another car. I should have followed the signs, that wasn’t right. All the 14 lessons were a disaster, I felt like Sponge Bob – just not made to drive. Failure is an ugly word. People should be more more subtle as when you are at a karaoke: try again, or you’re almost there. As time went by, I was getting worse. Nervousness does not help a person in traffic. When I finally managed to put my
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A walk on the corruptive side
car between two others, I got blinded by such happiness that I couldn’t see the stop sign. By the fourth time I was taking the exam, I realized how many friends and supporters I had at the traffic department: the coconut water seller used to say “be strong, Darling! Don’t you ever give up”. Mr. Inácio, the man responsable for checking the documents, seemed to me like a consultant: “you should read that book: “Never give up on your dreams”, by Augusto Cury – Augusto Cury is one of the most famous self-help writters in Brazil.
It did, in fact, take a long time before someone offered me a “scheme” at the traffic department. I considered one of the saddest things about Brazil is how everything can be turned into corruption within public service. After watching my desperation, an employee responsable for giving drive in licenses approached me with the magical solution to my problem. It would cost me R$ 800. He wasn’t worried about how he was giving a license to someone who didn’t know how to drive. He wasn’t worried if he was responsable for drinking and driving. He wasn’t thinking about how cars can become weapons. He was only worried about making some profit with another person’s desperation.
Yes, my fellow readers, the he crowd was good and catchy. They were cheering for me like as I was about to kick the penalty for World Cup final. But, every test seemed just more disappointing.
If I had taken that “opportunity”, I would have seen less than paying for more classes and for more tests. But accepting it would make me just the same as a bad politician. Corruption is one of Brazil’s biggest problems and we have to fight against it, not endorse it. After a year of frustrations, I didn’t get my driver’s license and lost the process. I felt bad, but met other people who were in the same situation, which shouldn’t help, but somehow does. Sorry about that.
Skeptics all I needed was a little training outside the driving school with someone patient, far way from other cars. So I took my mother’s car and went for a ride. I ended it up hitting an SW4 that was crossing the street. A lesson you will never get at the driving school: always run from cars that are bigger than yours. Seriously. Run, Forrest, run!
I had two options left: give up and get used to getting rides, or keep trying and practicing. I went for the second option. To face small or big problems we should keep in mind that the deception of failing in something can pass as fast as the happinness of being sucessful. New challenges are always taking the place of old results. Victory tastes better when we have to work hard to get there. This semester I’m taking the seventh test. Maybe at the next opportunity I will tell you a positive story, about how I passed the exam. After all, I discovered that perseverance is the last to die!
personal stateme
Versatility. If I could sum up my personal statement in a word, that would be it. Writing about yourself is always a chore, you need to know the boundaries between personal pride and humility, so I would rather talk about my ability to walk between themes and journalistic formats. When I started to work as an intern at the branch office of TV Globo in my state, I used to cover criminal pieces for the night show, today I write about business and technology for a website. And that’s what I found magical about journalism: work and learn about different aspects of our very diversified world. Meet people that are far from your reality and dive into their stories, projects and aspirations it’s enriching. Not only this, but to make a difference in a community. Although I’ve spent a long time producing stories for television, but I prefer to write and go deep into them. After all, it was my passion for reading papers and magazines that conviced me to pursue a career in journalism. In 2009, I fell in love with England. It was love at first sight, after six months studying English in Bournemouth and getting deeply in touch with the country’s culture. In addition to the arts, I also was able to get in touch with the British media and the quality of products developed by the
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newspapers and television really amazed me. Since then, I always thought in how could I bring some elements of the british methods into Brazilian journalism – to make it better, more responsible and interesting. About my academic background, I graduated in Social Communication at the Federal University of Paraíba in 2013. The University gave the opportunity of being part of many insteresting projects. One of them, was a simulation of a UN meeting. The simulation was promoted by the International Relations’ students and I was a part of the press committee. In 2010, I worked as interpreter during the International Law Association meeting, the lectures were about human rights. In addition to my BA, I took a course on editorial production given by ESPM in São Paulo. Today, my current job is at Portal Administradores, a website, magazine and online TV focused on business and management. There, I can write about economy and business in a more mature way. Inspired by magazines such as Fast Company and Wired, Administradores gave me freedom to write about tecnology as well. Finally, I believe that a post-graduate course at London College of Communication will help me accomplish some of my professional goals: to be part of a respectable media, that values the news and practices brave journalism and helps the community to understand the world around them. Regardless the scandals envolving the press and it’s methods, I still believe in journalism as a powerful weapon to change the world. To be the one who brings the information to the people, for me, is a great pleasure, but also a huge responsability.
academic background High School Colégio Motiva Bachelor Social Communication (Journalism) at the Federal University of Paraíba – September/2013 English certificate FCE - Eurocentres (Bournemouth) Extra activites · I National Conference of ILA 2010 – about law and human rights · Press committee at MUNDI IV – Simulation UN meeting sponsored by the State University of Paraíba · A vacation programa t the School of Advertising and Marketing (2012) - Graphic Production for journalists Participation in Intercom Lectures about media convergence
professional experience TV Cabo Branco – TV Globo (2010) Intership as a report for the night show Portal Administradores (2012 - Present) · Intership (2012 - 2013) – Functions: draft guidelines on management, business and marketing for Portal Administradores. Besides writing materials for the magazine and translate articles submitted by foreign authors. Conduct interviews, mostly in English. · Reporter (2013 - Present) – In addition to the accumulated functions as an intern, started interacting on social platforms site (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+). I also started collaborating with the guidelines for TV Administradores.
— Agatha Justino