Viewing: Notes » Echoes #4.
Echoes #4.
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Let's wrap-up the exploration of 'informal presentation, etcetera' which began in 'Echoes…' and expanded into 'Echoes #2' and 'Echoes #3'.
Here's the OpenAI view… in response to a slightly different conversation-opener than the other AIs: 'Keen to learn, I asked Claude/DeepSeek/Kimi 'Is there a case for presenting oneself informally, as in this example: https://glvr.com/ ?'.'
Yes—and I think the interesting thing is that the question is not really whether informality is acceptable. It is whether informality can itself be a credible professional presentation.
And, having looked at what you mean by the glvr example, I think the answer is a fairly emphatic yes.
There is actually a useful distinction here: informal doesn't necessarily mean unprofessional
A conventional professional presentation says:
Here is my professional identity. I have selected the appropriate evidence, removed the unnecessary personal material, adopted the expected vocabulary and arranged everything so that you can efficiently assess my suitability.
glvr says something closer to:
This is me. Have a look around. You'll work out what I do.
Those are radically different propositions.
And the second one can work particularly well when the person has already accumulated enough evidence of competence that they don't need to perform competence at every turn.
That is an important point. Informality isn't inherently credible. A 23-year-old consultant whose website says 'Hey! I'm Dave and I help ambitious businesses unlock their potential' isn't necessarily going to benefit from being informal. It may simply look undercooked.
But someone with decades of experience saying, in effect, 'Yes, I know what I'm doing. Anyway, here's what interests me…' can produce quite a different impression.
There's some evidence for exactly this broader idea. Current thinking around personal websites increasingly treats them as spaces for expressing professional identity rather than simply reproducing a CV, and the IndieWeb tradition has explicitly valued personal sites that are human-centred and informal rather than optimised around conventional metrics.
In fact, informality can communicate confidence
There's a slightly counter-intuitive psychological signal:
The less somebody appears to need to convince you, the more convincing they can become.
Compare:
I am an experienced business developer with extensive expertise in strategic growth, innovation and transformational business solutions.
with:
I've been messing about with businesses for quite a long time. Some of it has even worked.
The second doesn't claim authority.
It assumes that authority will emerge from what follows.
That's potentially much more powerful.
It is rather like the difference between a good restaurant where the chef has put 'MICHELIN-STARRED CULINARY EXCELLENCE' in six-foot letters over the entrance and one where the chef is simply getting on with making excellent food.
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