Luciferjones

I was asked 3 times this week what I do…? Obviously this was in reference to what i do for a living, and each time the answer was intolerably difficult to iterate. It would appear that I am a definitive child of the digital age; Jack of all trades and increasingly failing to see the separations between them.

There is a traditional notion of Professionals vs Non Professionals (Doctors and Accountants as opposed to Plumbers and Carpenters) which was based on the idea that professionals made a living by what they KNEW and non-professionals made a living from what they could DO. But this is a useless definition in the 21st century and perhaps never had any real relevance. Likewise the idea that a Professional needed qualifications where a Non-Professional did not, is simply not the case as the idea of trained and attained qualifications appear across virtually all forms of work careers.

More useful perhaps is the notion that a professional is defined as having skills based on theoretical knowledge. The idea being here that carpentry, plumbing, building are highly skilled but aren’t necessarily based on theoretical or conceptual ideas – Medicine, Science and Law as prime examples of work that does. And yet there are too many holes in this framework to make it useful with plenty of careers regarded as ‘professions’, such as Real Estate Agents that have a long stretch to make a case that there’s an underlying theoretical knowledge at play.

Professional and Amateur (often labeled Consumer) are terms bandied about with painful regularity in the creative industries. One can barely find a creative software tool that doesn’t bare the moniker of ‘Pro’ in its name – evidently this is marketing department efforts to convince consumers that they’ll be thought of as “professionals” if they use that particular brand. Subsequently then with the distinct implication that to Not use that software means you’re Not a professional.

The terms Professional and Consumer in the creative industries are shrouded in mystique of culture and social structure, pecking order and ego but when boiled down to simple definition it may be said that, if nothing else, a Creative Professional makes a living in creative industry where as an amateur/consumer does it on the side; as hobby, passion and endeavor. This is a distinction that functions certainly for areas such as sport.

So by that notion it becomes interesting to ask myself, Am I Professional? And if so, more significantly, a professional what…? If I take just the work-roles I have been engaged in over the past 3 months I am indelibly a professional Filmmaker, Producer, Editor, Teacher, Journalist, Consultant, Academic and Website developer. These are the roles I have engaged of late to make a living. Is this enough to make me a ‘Professional’…? Or does the fact that no one of these roles as a singular pursuit was enough to make a living: I needed them all the sum of the parts don’t make the whole; 8 professional bits don’t make 1 full Professional.

The long standing perception has been therefore that one only become a professional with specialization - the focus on a singular pursuit: professional Editor, Director or Screenwriter? This has long been the cultural perception, if not the actual definition, of professional.

But in the digital age the attachment of ‘Professional’ to the idea of ‘Specialization’ is rendered arguably useless and without worth. The domain of the singular art professional, the specialist, is beset on all sides by a fundamentally different production culture; a culture that is, by proxy, re-defining the term professional itself.

When the distinction between production and post-production is extremely hazy, where the distinction between live-action and animation hard to discern, the separation between ‘passive’ and ‘interactive’ media largely irrelevant; then its inevitable that the roles we play in producing media in this hybridized and hazy environment become similarly blurred. In doing so they loose their traditional connections with Professional as Specialist and with the idea that the Professional is someone who makes a living with a specific set of knowledge-skills related to a particular task.

Add to this the opening up of the technology itself to holistic processes – a unified and shared creative sandpit where distinctions between media forms, acquisitions types and output platforms for creative projects are fused and parallel rather than segmented and hierarchical – and we have a very different filtration of the idea of the Professional.  (see a previous post about the new paradigm of Photoshop)

In the creative industries what is left is distilled remnants of previous definitions, stripped of their detritus. The Professional as someone employing skills based on conceptual and theoretical knowledge; The Professional as one who makes a living from those skills and knowledge; and The Professional as one who utilities their skills and knowledge in a professional manner with Professionalism… The last of these is just too hard to define (and yet so highly valued). The second is purely pragmatic defining.

But to my mind its the first that stands as the only really tangible distinction of the Professional – a monkey can be taught to use a camera, a child instructed how to cut sequences in an NLE. But only a professional can perform these tasks and use these skills with a larger conceptual understanding and a theoretical positioning focused on making meaning, building context and communicating ideas.

Until we embrace the Professional as the embodiment of the Conceptual – until we fuse Skills and Practice with Theoretical critical thinking we will, as members of the creative industry, fail to be and act professionally….