On communication, professional and otherwise.
by David Murray // 4 Comments
I have an acquaintance who is on the wagon. Probably good for him, right?
So yesterday I'm scrolling the headlines at the Huffington Post and my eye is caught by the weird-let's-connect-everybody-all-the-time section that tells me (as if I care) which HuffPo articles my friends are reading.
And so, quite accidentally, I learn that my wagon-riding pal has read, "Classic Drink Recipes for Today's Economy."
And so now I'm worried about my friend's drinking, and his finances too.
by David Murray // 9 Comments
On and around yesterday's topic of nobodies:
People say everyone wants to be famous these days. Actually, I would have been more likely to say that ten years ago. But now we know that there's actually a tiny percentage of the American population that doesn't want to be famous. They're the ones who don't have a Facebook account.
The rest of us? Yeah, we want to be famous.*
In my twenties, I remember talking straight up with my wife about how I hoped to be interviewed by David Letterman one day. Shameless vanity is typical of young writers, who actually have a path, however unlikely, to some version of fame. ("The best fame is a writer's fame," Fran Lebowitz says. "It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.")
But until the advent of Facebook, Twitter and Super Nanny, most people not named Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't imagine how they would ever become famous.
They never had the whiff of fame that 46 views of your YouTube video gives you, and unless they got up a head of steam and ran for town councilman, they lived and died without ever knowing firsthand that being known about by strangers is as fulfilling as eating cotton candy.
But these days the cotton candy is flying off the shelves, because the people who wanted to be famous all along are finding ways to feel like they're famous.
The trouble is—and I hope they will learn this—there is no such thing as being famous. There are a thousand such things.
There is having 123 Twitter followers, some of whom you have never heard of.
There is being well-known in a small and insulated circle. By that measure, I am famous, and have been for 15 years. But then, you—and only you—already knew that.
There is being well-known in a slightly larger, well-insulated circle.This is the level of fame you need to get an obituary in The New York Times, where more people learn about you upon your death than ever knew about you during your life. (I read the Times obits to meet new people.)
There are Tanya Harding, Philip Michael Thomas and Rickey Schroder. And there are the Beatles.
Thinking you want fame is like wandering into a bar and saying, "Booze, please."
The next question is, "What kind?"
* The only person who I know who does not want to be famous, even secretly and for only five minutes a month, is my wife. Sho is truculently unimpressed by fame. One afternoon some years ago well-connected movie-producer friend called to ask me what I knew about a young actress he was thinking of using in a movie. I didn't reognize the name, but I called downstairs, "Cristie, Tony's on the phone. He wants to know, do you know who Lindsay Lohan is?"
Cristie yelled back, "Oh, for Christ's sake, is Tony bringing Lindsay Lohan over for dinner?"
by David Murray // 9 Comments
I started quite a firestorm about four years ago when I observed in a magazine I edited that there was a blogger who I read religiously despite the fact that he was "pretty much a nobody" in the communication business.
I meant for people to focus on the reasons that I read this guy regularly despite his lack of status and readership reach. Instead, predictably enough, everyone focused on the term "nobody," and I was nibbled half to death by a dozen or more bloggers, who saw themselves as aggrieved "nobodies" too, standing up for the trufula trees.
I tried to dismiss what ensued as a tempest in a teapot, but when you're in the teapot, it feels like a hell of a storm.
And now I try to think of the thing as a kind of online accident that couldn't happen today because bloggers are more reconciled to their niche status. Besides, I'm writing on a blog, so if you're a nobody, I'm a nobody too!
But it was last week when I read a story in The New York Times about anonymous online commenters. And I waited until this week to say what I think about it: I that people who comment on online stories are all anonymous, or might as well be. Anonymous, and utterly unheard. An online commenter to a big-media online story is—dare I say it again?!—a nobody.
For any comment to make any impact in the comments section of an online article, the commenter has to have some agreed-upon status among the rest of the readership. At a niche blog, that's easy: Commenters at Writing Boots, for example, have automatic status simply because they read Writing Boots, which means we all see them as fellow travelers. Many of them have further status because they are professional communicators. And then I and the other Writing Boots readers confer yet more status upon commenters when we acknowledge their posts and engage them in further conversation, the content of which is an essential part of the experience of the blog. And then we slowly get to know one another, as regulars, and it's "I wonder what Kristen's take is going to be," or "uh oh, wait until Robert sees this."
By utter contrast, think of hundreds and hundreds of people who comment on articles in The New York Times: They are not members of any particular community; all they have in common with one another is that they are readers of the English language. Unless they identify themselves as real experts on the subject they are discussing (in hopes that people will believe that the dean of the Harvard Business School is wasting his time commenting on NYTimes.com), they have no status there either. They are not even writers of published letters to the editor, who get credibility because an editor chose their opinion out of hundreds of others. Almost never does the writer of the original article acknowledge readers' comments. And because there are so many commenters, there is no familiarity; everyone is a stranger to everyone else.
It seems cruel to say: But the thousands and thousands and maybe millions of habitual commenters on articles on mainstream media websites are deluded believers that their opinion counts for anything more than one, added to a comment count.
Try to imagine hearing someone say, "You know, I changed my thinking on healthcare after I read a comment in a discussion of a newspaper article. It came from a fellow named 'tooldude,' and he said something I'll never forget …."
Never happen. I don't care if tooldude wrote like Oscar Wilde: Nobody would ever remember a thing he wrote, and he'd be better off shouting at the TV news, because then at least then his wife and kids would hear him.