How to be the new #influencer or rather #enabler

Friday night and I’m sat locked-eyed with Jonny (left) and Fi (behind the camera) watching a performance at the Opera House in Central London. We’ve come to support our Rob on the right, a second yearer at Rambert School.

It’s a thrilling evening with creative sets and narratives expressed through contemporary and eclectic dance performance. Rob’s group performance looks something out of Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Some twenty dancers dressed in industrial brown garments creating a series of lattices.

And then all of a sudden a noticeable noise. One of the dancers tumbles mounting another dancer in the circle. But what happens next is as unnoticeable as it is creative. The dancer is unhurt, the choreography continues. After the performance Rob lets us in to the secret.

“Yeah we talked about it. If anything happens on the mounts we’re all go down immediately”. It was a piece of improv that looked seamless, but also masked the mishap. Rob and the fellow dancers were enablers.

We hear about enablers in other lines of work; the actor who forgets their line and their co-star sees them through. The worker who can’t make the meeting and is covered by a colleague. In all of these a relationship facilitates empathy for people to help each other.

But what when you don’t have that relationship? A symptom of social media’s birth has been the growth of the influencer, the digital incarnation of meism that started to surface noticeably offline in the 80s.

Back then Gordon “Wall street”Gecko, Harry-loads a money, and the champagne lifestyle of capitalism was swelling pockets under Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Remember the slogan, “greed is good”.

This was to be the precursor to the influencer years ahead online where the transaction is to create attention around oneself or as a character to command attention to sell your wares. But the point is self centredness is a natural effortless feature of human nature, particularly amongst people who don’t know each other.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether we’re born selfish, with more recent research from the University of Michigan suggesting toddlers exhibit sharing behaviour. But as they grow, society make its presence known. In Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd, and award-winning documentary maker Adam Curtis’s Century of Self self-centredness is on the table. Both authors find people so gullible, whilst wanting to score points off each other.

Some societies that encourage community spirit eschew influencer behaviour adopting more enablers. What’s the difference? One draws attention to themselves, the other deflects the attention away to benefit others. It’s not uncommon in several societies for those with very little to be givers.

When the net began to materialise as a community space around early 2000s captured piquantly in one of the most talked about books at the time, “We the Media”, enablers were in abundance.

People online engaged in discourse and favours towards community building and enabling but by 2007 as the Net was slowly developing into a multi-billion market place enabling gave way to influencers. The idea that you wanted a platform to connect the world through some seemingly altruistic feat couldn’t disguise the fact that you were making a buck from people’s most prized commodity — their time.

Today it’s fashionable and a much sought career path to be an influencer. But given the state of the world, of the Net where an innocuous tweet can invite derision, can influencing continued unabated? Is there room for a different kind of influencer whose empathy reframes behaviour to enable others.

Enabling is a more effortful task. It requires learning to see views from other people’s perspective. It invites introspection and the meme to try and understand and do no harm.

Simply put, do onto others what you would want them to do you, but frankly be proactive by doing good to others. Wouldn’t that be something, asking a group of school children what they want to be when they grow up? Amongst the doctor, entrepreneur, actor and office worker, how about enabler?

And when asked what skills you need? Everything! Everything that helps to connect different people and ideas together. I’d dance to that any day.