{"id":13362,"date":"2015-03-24T03:51:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T03:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/airgordon-i-was-not-a-very-good-intern-namely\/"},"modified":"2015-03-24T03:51:44","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T03:51:44","slug":"airgordon-i-was-not-a-very-good-intern-namely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/airgordon-i-was-not-a-very-good-intern-namely\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

airgordon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I was not a very good intern, namely because I was focused at all the tasks I enjoyed\u2014fact-checking, research, reporting, writing\u2014and basically worthless at the tasks I decided were beneath me. I would actually invent reasons to get out of having to do menial tasks, which is obviously a great attitude for a 22-year old.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But at the last internship I ever had, I found a niche: Tumblr. Fast Company<\/i>\u2019s social media presence was very unformed at the turn of 2011 (ironic for a magazine that breathlessly covers the tech world) and for some reason, no one blinked when the intern asked if he could run the Tumblr. It must have come up in a meeting. \u201cSo, we have fastcompany.tumblr.com registered, and should do something with that because we\u2019ve run several articles about how Tumblr is the next wave. Who wants it?\u201d I alone answered the call. Blogging became my daily task, what I defaulted to when I had no articles to fact-check or blurbs to write.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was no one I had to approve posts with, no guidelines. I think I was told to link to at least one of our articles per day, and that was it. Every Tumblr and Twitter today is run by a 22-year old, I believe, but it\u2019s hard to be to imagine they have no instructions or editorial oversight. I was running the off-shoot website of a very<\/i>\u00a0popular magazine at my own whim. I wrote about Soulja Boy<\/a>. I posted Mountain Goats songs. I teased our articles with links like:\u00a0\u201cChillwaver or Cabinet member?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of this is essential or important or Good, and there were 22-year olds are the time doing work that was<\/i>\u00a0essential and important and Good. (There are 22-year olds now<\/i>\u00a0who are doing that work.) It\u2019s just very weird to me that any of this happened\u2014that I didn\u2019t have to use the 2011 equivalent of\u00a0\u201cbae\u201d to keep myself relevant, and that I somehow didn\u2019t fuck it up. The Internet was so lawless then! You could do whatever you want! Social media managers were barely a thing, and already we were joking about how the industry was doomed to collapse into itself. (Four years later, har har har.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure if you\u2019ve been reading airgordon dot tumblr dot com since 2011 (that\u2019s some of you!) you may already know this. But it\u2019s four years to the day<\/a> since I hashtagged an infographic about medical marijuana as #weed and not, you know, #medical marijuana, so I\u2019m feeling nostalgic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

airgordon: I was not a very good intern, namely because I was focused at all the tasks I enjoyed\u2014fact-checking, research, reporting, writing\u2014and basically worthless at the tasks I decided were beneath me. I would actually invent reasons to get out of having to do menial tasks, which is obviously a great attitude for a 22-year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3tw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}