The new concept of socializing and interacting online has given all of us some sort of virtual identities, sometimes it is the same personality we have in real life and sometimes a little different or more ideal personality. It is a completely new zone, a virtual one with different kinds of power, Cyberspace has been the ultimate virtual world where people are finding their true selves in.

No matter what our nationalities are, or where we live, once we are plugged and connected we enter this virtual world, this reminds me with the Matrix movie where they had to be plugged in order to get into the Matrix, although I don’t agree with its negative view of the AI evolution, I prefer Isaac Asimov way of humanizing the machines by giving them feelings and not taking them as enemies, but in both cases the question is about the new technologies and what new concerns they will make. What about cyberspace? Hasn’t it given us a strange power as individuals?

Information Overload

When we decide to dig for a piece of information, few years back we used to get short with the found information from books and papers or even asking experts, spending a lot of hours and we still feel that a lot is missing, but now online by surfing the web for few minutes we can find more than we need, we start selecting, choosing, and filtering, there are a lot of results and alot of answers for the same topic we are looking for. When google gives you over a milion search results it’s impossible to see them all, you will filter and choose, this is the information overload, it has even created the new concept of procrastinating where we start going from site to another and forgetting what we were doing in the first place.

Information overload has given us this individual cyberpower, being able to find any information about anything at anytime. We feel powerful and able to seek anything, like if we have it all in our minds, we are not afraid of difficult questions, but we developed our skills to find them and filter the results effectivly.

Having more knowledge and the ability to learn faster have encouraged people to produce more than consume, like this article for example, there are many resources online about cyberspace and cyberpower, but I felt that I have another vision so I didn’t hesitate to share it online, another source, another information overload, and it’s up to the users and readers to choose from.

Different Identity

For individuals cyberspace has opened new gates, bypassing censorship, participating in decisions, the ability to know the forbidden and even share all of this, this power is still evolving, with the revolution of Web2.0 people are not only consuming and producing information online, but they are interacting with it, and developing new types of information, wikis and web applications, everybody has his own home (account) in every website, it’s not only being plugged, now it is being logged in too.

Whatever you are in real life, whatever your work is, or your physical conditions are, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about your ability to use the computer and surf the web, and you’ve got this power, in cyberspace there are no nationalities or skin color or lifetime disability, you can be what you want even if you can’t be it in real life.

We still hear a lot about people who fake their identities online, sometimes it is not really faking as much as it is showing the real inner personality that they can’t show in real life, expressing some sort of ideas that they can’t express in real life, or they don’t have anybody to share it with.

Credibility

What about the credibility of these information and knowledge online? How much are they trustable and how much they are not? It is interesting how some individuals has developed a new way of trust, it’s not about reading the information, they prefer to know who wrote it, or where is it from, they check the site name, the writer name and sometimes they dig to check their credibility, this may sound a good way, but at the end not all internet users are able to judge their sources.

In the other hand it became more difficult on the authors themselves to maintain and establish this credibility, there are no jury to judge them, it’s their readers who will trust them or not, anyhow credibility is still a big unsolved issue in cyberspace that require some more research and work.

Cyberspace is a space that powers the individuals and get powered by them, cyberpower is really a huge subject with a lot of things to discuss, in this article I tried to summarize the individual cyberpower from my point of view, there are still some other cyberpowers to talk about like the community power, and the giants power, which I’ll be posting about shortly.

Reading The Four-Day Week Challenge by Ryan Carson on A List Apart brought this article to my mind, it is a lovely idea to work 4 days a week instead of 5, but is this possible during the construction stage?

Not only towers and buildings or architecture work have a construction stage, we as human beings do construct ourselves too, these years of our twenties when we are working over 15 hours a day to accomplish the unaccomplished and reach the stars, since we are students and after we graduate, putting our dreams, setting our targets and planning for them, then begin the hard work, we start The Construction Stage.

The Two Ways

Whether we are planning to build a successful career and a secure job, or planning to be self employed and independent, in both cases the construction stage is the key to achieve this target, the way we go through and build our assets and our understanding to it.

Career

In the career scenario the target is clear, to find the right job with the right employer that believes in you, utilizes your skills and gives you as much as you give. This job that you will grow with while you are sure that as long as you are doing better, you will get promoted and raised.

Finding this job is the difficult part, after college as a fresh graduate with no experience or practical knowledge, maybe you will spend few years in different jobs until you find your target, meanwhile working on yourself, making better references and gaining respectful experience, this is your construction stage.

Self-employed

Starting a business is not that difficult as it was before, specially if you have the skills and you are able to do it as your profession and craft, but it is more complicated than the career scenario. To go solo you need a capital, resources, you have to build a reputation to move with, not to mention the other responsibilities that you may have, some people have a backup support by their parents or partners, but others don’t and they are fully responsible about their choice and have build it on their own.

One of the reasons why starting a business is more difficult and complicated than building a career is that the employee in general get motivated and encouraged by his management to do more and develop himself, while in the other hand in the solo business situation requires more optimality and strong believe in the self and the dream project itself in order to move forward.

When you are working solo you don’t get encouraged, you are the one who have to take care about everything, the competition the bills, the salaries (if you have employees), and the business itself too, while the employee will take care of himself and his personal skills only as his employer will take care of the rest.

The Hard Way

When your target is to be self employed but at the same time you have bills to pay, then you have to find a job that at least pays your bills and gives you enough time to develop yourself and prepare for the solo move.

I call such a job the Backup Job, it’s the security job, when you are able to secure your life and pay your bills, even save some money to start your own business, it is not the dream job that you are looking for, and not the job that you will get promoted in and do what you love, it is just a job where you do what you know even if you don’t like.

Sometimes even after starting solo business without good planning you may reach the point that you have to do something you don’t like to survive, doing projects that you don’t believe in just to have enough income to support yourself and meet your responsibilities, this is very much related to your planning, if your plan is solid and you did construct well you will not need to do this, and you will be in the exact position you wished for, choosing your own clients and doing the kind of projects that you are really enjoying, not doing them just for the money.

At The End…

It is not just a matter of choice or dream, it’s how much do you believe in your target, and how strong is your will to achieve it, or else why there are many people still working in the same unpromising job for the last decades.. in my opinion it’s either their will that wasn’t enough to help them achieve, or maybe their situation was so bad and they had too much responsibilities to take care of so they didn’t have enough time for themselves.

Back to the four-day week challenge, in the construction stage, I think it should be The 24/7 Challenge depending on our situation, as long as we are in the construction stage the hard work and the believe in what we are doing will take our time at least until we reach a decent position and have the ability to take the four-day week challenge.

Personally I’m in the middle of this stage, what about you? did you build your assets, still planning, or did you already hit your target? share your opinion with us here and let’s learn from each other.

Almost everybody is blogging his own review of 2005, picking some of it’s good and sharing his plans of 2006, so here is mine:


Last January I was hired to do a web design and development as a full time job and I wanted to do something unique and new, specially in my region (The Middle East and Dubai), and after a good search I decided to buy Zeldman’s book “Designing with Web Standards”, at first I didn’t know what is all these standards about and didn’t know the author himself neither, after reading the book I understood that I was missing a very big deal of the Cyberspace nowadays, a lot of trends, knowledge and stuff are waiting out there. Very special thanks to Zeldman to the doors he opened to me through his book and blog, thanks to the Web Standards Community and ALA writers, who shared their knowledge for free, everyday some more knowledge, something new to read, a lot on the schedule to learn.


A year from now I was using IE and its favourites for bookmarking, depending my whole day on some desktop applications, subscribed to a lot of newsletters that I didn’t really read.. but now in 2006 I’ve noticed that I’m completely changed:
I use del.icio.us for my Bookmarks.
I use Bloglines to read my favourite blogs (I’m not subscribed to newsletters anymore).
I use 37signals products (Ta-da, BaseCamp and BackPack) to organize myself and my work better.
I log my music on AudioScrobbler, discovering some new music on Last.FM.
I’m rolling on Ruby on Rails, and enjoying Ajax.
I started some new projects like Amidship (with Mohanad Alyajouri) and FRESH PX (with Abdelrahman Osama).


2005 was really a fruitful year for me where I learned a lot and I think it’s time now in 2006 for some real achievements and some real work.

Thanks to Siham, who really kept her promise in writing an article about this wonderful forum we all attended.
I already uploaded the article as an image in the "Documents ad Photos" section and you can access it online as well:
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/NotesNF.asp?ArticleID=155728
Thank you Siham one more time, it was a very honest report and I hope we can do this meeting again and again, to see what we have done, and what's the future plans as well.
Thank you and kind regards
Rida Al Barazi