Rip van Winkle didn’t recognize the America he woke to after his twenty-year drunken nap. I know the feeling.
I spent most of my working life producing newspapers and magazines and writing for them. A publication’s audience could be paid or free. Paying readers and advertisers footed the bills. Editors were seducers, primping their pages to entice their target population. The trick of editing was to appeal without appalling: no rattling teacups, unless you were assembling an audience of teacup-rattlers.
In today’s post-print age, anybody who wants to can turn publisher. AI tells me 5.24 billion persons use social media, roughly two-thirds of earth’s humans. Anybody can say anything online. Calumny runs amok, impossible to patrol. Neither probity nor sanity restrain online gassers. Every shade of prejudice is permissible. Prepubescents transform themselves to “influencers” with crazy antics. Quantity of followers is what counts, not quality of utterance. With so much raucous ruckus it’s hard to hear.
A craving for companions commenced these missives more than a decade ago. In kind, these dispatches hardly differ from tweets or other social media spillage. I hankered not to be overlooked. My audience grew gradually to my pleased surprise, but so what? Whether I was read by a hundred or a million didn’t affect me much. My new goal was to be a pal, not a publisher.
A year or so ago, I began to feel for some future for my words. My ambition was age appropriate. Soon enough, I’d be dead and my kids stuck with my voluminous remains, a cruel patrimony. How many other humans, I wondered, might find my gush gratifying? How to find out?
My present platform, Substack, promised to grow my audience like Jack’s beanstalk, by introducing my words to others in their garrulous community. My audience grew – some – but laboriously, tediously. I was trudging a long road to nowhere, wasting zest – to hell with that.
A friend introduced me to Facebook advertising. Facebook’s algorithms sort through its three billion users in a supercharged dating game. We boosted a trifling piece about the minor poet Ernest Dowson and whaddayaknow, we were dowsed with Dowson fans. My readership doubled in a month, doubled again, and shows no signs of slowing. Whether these new subscribers will persist – or pay when we beseech – time will tell; but they are actual, numerous, uncoerced, not bots or phantoms. How many of “us” might be out there, devotees of poetry, literacy, decency, grace, truth, common sense, the occasional polysyllable, eager for the consolation of community? Who knows. But more than I’d ever dreamed!
While I shy from Facebook’s indulgent self-idolatry – WowWee, look at me! – if it can introduce me to potential playmates at this pace, bless it. Whether our natural coterie numbers five or five hundred thousand, we are not, as I once feared, zero. Nor is my appeal confined to the few I’ve met face to face. My words are making friends on their own.
This growth spurt giddies. New readers raise the stakes for my prose. I always write my best but now I must write better. Might our little congregation develop into a force? Might we encourage one another to defy the corruption of our age? I bemoan the condition of our nation – what sane observer doesn’t? – but maybe, just maybe, we are not yet out for the count.
It seems I’m becoming a publisher again, not for my own benefit, but on my words’ behalf. I feel increasingly (don’t laugh) a servant of my hour, pastoral in my zeal. No, friends, we are not alone. Together is an intoxicating notion.