At our last class meeting (which was actually our first), I asked that everyone write something about what they believed to be their individual mission. This was discussed briefly and without much detail. This was to leave as many doors open as possible to as many individual interpretations of what that might mean.
What is your “mission?” Certainly there is the religious sense of the term; being on “a mission from God” is a well-known phrase, although no doubt different people understand this idea in different ways. And certainly, although anyone is free to discuss them, such ideas are far beyond the scope of this class.
Instead, I hoped that each of you would use this as an opportunity to ask yourselves what exactly you wanted to achieve in your professional evolution, in your careers.
For example, you might have begun to fulfill the assignment by stating that you wanted to be the best movie director in the world, and win the Academy Award for best director 10 years in a row. But then you would need to go beyond this brave statement to explain WHY you wanted to be the best director, and what qualities of your movies would earn you that reputation. It’s the explanation that’s the hard part.
Deeply interwoven in that explanation would almost necessarily be some sense of the impact or effect you wanted your movies to have on your audiences. Once you start thinking about that impact, and how other people respond to what you have created, then you are beginning to explore the idea of mission. Although we often talk abut a “mission from…” some place of person or authority (“I’m on a mission from the President…”), we should also understand that the other side of the idea is the sense that any mission is a “mission to…” somebody or someplace or “a mission to accomplish” something that is beyond yourself.
In other words, it makes more sense to say, “I’m on a mission to make the most emotionally powerful movies imaginable, so powerful that people weep as they leave the theater and the world acknowledges me as the best director in history.” In other words, the title “best director” is simply a description or a badge that comes after you have accomplished your mission.
Let’s switch gears. Forget the Academy Awards.
What if you wanted to work in advertising?
As we discussed briefly in class, advertising may be the prime moving force in the development of the Web. We might even say that the Web itself is just one very, very large venue for advertising – in he same way that the Yellow Pages might be thought of as a type of advertising. In the so-called Information Age (That’s right now, in case you were wondering.) any and all information is practically a form of advertising, whether you are advertising a product, a service, a company, an idea of even yourself (What are online dating services except “smart” or “targeted” advertising venues for people?)
If your professional aspirations inclined you toward advertising, the question of mission will still need an answer, or at least a few minutes of speculation: What IS my mission in the advertising profession? To sell the most product? To make the most money? To match the consumer with the product or service he/she really wants? Or perhaps what they really need? (And that might be different.) Or would your mission be somehow to improve the world by successfully advertising an idea like “don’t pollute” or “get some exercise and stop eating junk food?”
There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. Nobody is saying you need to go out and “save the whales” in order to be a decent human being or a successful professional in the realm of media-information-communications (MIC) technology.
However, it is worthwhile to ask yourself, is there any connection, any parallel, any harmony between my individual sense of mission and the choice of MIC technology or MIC profession that I am pursuing? Another way to ask the question, does my personal sense of mission stand on or require a particular type of MIC platform?
In other words, does my mission to be the greatest movie director in history demand that I make movies that are seen in large dark rooms on screens 50 feet across? Is my entire idea of movies revolve around a central, traditional concept of the experience and meaning of “movie?”
What if you wanted to be a great novelist – would your concept of the reader’s experience (and thus your sense of mission to the reader) be built upon the expectation that the reader would be experiencing your creations on a good-old-fashioned paper-and-ink book? How would the soon-to-be-released Apple tablet reader (rumored to run approx. $1,000 per unit with all sorts of multimedia capacity) change your sense of that experience, and perhaps your sense of mission?
We can consider these and other questions in class.
Steve
