Quantum of Solicitude

Williams still comes off like a cheerleader for this better world. He told me that a Medium user wrote an open letter to him, saying that though they had posted to the site every day for a month, they had not gotten more than 100 “recommends” on their post yet. (Every social network has its atomic unit of dopamine-like recognition: Facebook has likes, Twitter has hearts, Medium has the recommend.) He said he wanted to reply and tell the guy to step back.

“Think about what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re playing this game for attention that half of humanity is playing. And you’re competing for not only the thousands of people who publish on Medium the same day, the millions of people who publish on websites that have ever published, the billion videos on YouTube, every book in the world, not to mention what’s on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, everything else, right now—it’s amazing any people are reading your stuff!”

That this can still happen—that any subset of readers can still find and read an amateur writer’s work—is what excites him most about Medium. Talking about the centralization of the web, he continually returns to the “bad world.” 

I look at the read count of my posts sometimes.

It makes me laugh - the urging to be read, to be notorious.  As if being read makes my words more real or important.  When, really, it just makes them more forgettable - you can't forget something that you never read.

Fleming writes of the quantum of solace - that minimum amount of fellow feeling that must exist between two people to have any relationship based not on mere necessity.

But the view count, the likes, the shares, the subscribes - what is all of it other than a token economy - where each of these clicks is a small quantum of solicitude?  Small measures of the attention that a person is willing to invest in you.

Maybe we think that if enough people care about us for 10 seconds a day, it will add up.  Certainly the way that Youtube views can lead to actual financial remuneration, it adds up in a way, of a sort.

But I can't help thinking that people - many people - may have unwittingly convinced themselves that it will add up in the other sort of way.  That lots of little likes means that one is loved, lots of small attentions means that one is important or interesting.

I'm not sure it works that way.  Unless what you put into the world is interesting and stimulating to you - chances are good that it won't be interesting, stimulating or memorable to anyone.  On the reverse, if it isn't interesting to you and fascinating to others, you're reduced to being a slave.

People who actually command more than merely a quantum of an audience's attention are the exception to the rule, subject to that reverse affliction - invasive notoriety - stardom, fame, the violation of what little space there is for personal solace in the world.

There have and always will be - two types of writers.  The first write things to be read.  And the second write things that need to be written.  Anything that you've ever read in your life written more than 5 years earlier was likely written by the second type of writer.  Anything that is written solely for the purpose of attracting eyeballs is probably forgettable enough that no one ever gave it a second thought again.  It's a paradox but an undeniably truth.  Writing to satisfy or entice an audience is the surest way to never find a lasting or meaningful one.

We can't have it all.  And because we can't, I can content myself with being total absorbed by things that I write.  If someone else reads this and takes that to heart...well, that's just found money.