HYPERTEXT WONDERLAND

I’m looking for a new job at the moment which has got me wondering if covering letters are outdated. Judging from the positions I’ve applied for so far, I’d say a CV plus cover letter is very much the norm for what employers ask for. However the way we communicate online these days seems fundamentally ill-suited to these types of long form messages. It makes applying using a cover letter a strange and often awkward thing to do. To explain, think about how we communicate online with other people. It’s not through big passages of text, dropped into conversation with the subtly of a second-year philosophy student. No, it’s smaller. We now communicate in short forms sent in quick passages. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram. You name it. All of these are dominated by short messages delivered quickly, sometimes accompanied by emojis. This is what makes writing a cover letter feel verbose. I wonder if the person reading my cover letters have the patience to fi...

'My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better,' said Apple founder Steve Jobs at point in time to somebody who was definitely not me. Presumably this pithy point about the purpose of his metier didn’t account for the recent phone security quandary Apple have been having but it's still a great quote to sum up what their philosophy s'all aboout . Unfortunately my job as Social Media Guy is neither as influential not as well paid as Monsieur Jobs’ vocation but it has provided me with a decent opportunity to research into Cyberpsychology, which I did all afternoon. Here's five things I learnt: 1) Selfies can be explained by our need to control how others perceive us. The reason people share selfies relates to an unconscious desire to understand ourselves, and also to change how people perceive how we look. We take selfies to alter the way we look to others, usually getting the best angle possible to achieve a look that we consi...