ASH-10 Pete Ashton is at work
About Pete Ashton
I started blogging in June 2000. Seven years later someone paid me to start and run a blog called Created in Birmingham. A few months later someone else paid me to talk about it to a room of artists. Eventually I accepted that this wasn’t weird and that it might be my career now. In the subsequent years numerous people have paid me to do numerous things that can usually be traced back to those heady days when the world was just discovering the social power of the Internet and wanted to know how it worked.
I have spent a significant proportion of those five years trying to figure out the answer to the question “so what exactly is it that you do for a living?” and have recently decided it’s not worth the bother. I do all sorts of things and in the last couple of years they’ve roughly fallen in to two camps.
Explaining. Lectures, workshops, consultancy, mentoring, any situation where I make things clearer. The best compliment I ever received was that I “brought clarity”.
Creating. Website building, photography, blogging, social reporting, situations where I make things.
I also do a bit of project and people management. And other things. But mostly I explain and create stuff.
I build my professional reputation by knowing how the Internet works but I feel uncomfortable being defined by that. I find digital technologies to be fascinating for what they allow us to explore and create, not in an of themselves. The Internet is not powerful. The Internet used by someone who understands how it works and wants to do amazing things with it is powerful. I like helping people get to that point.
Photo by Matt Murtagh