Checking My Stats

My morning screen sequence begins with a What's New.  Emails first, then FB, blog next, Twitter, Reddit, and Medium Daily Digest.  Who responded to me, or at least acknowledged me? My Stats. As we become accustomed to our place in the social media sphere, most of the Stats have considerable predictability.  Emails largely automated from people wanting their desired share of my money.  Rarely a message directed to me from somebody that I know.  FB will have about three notifications with its red bell, the vast majority Likes of something I had posted or shared.  Twitter I can expect zero.  Reddit does not send me its Lpikes routinely, only when I reach milestones.  Occasionally I will get a notice of somebody who responded to me transferred to my email.  Medium Daily Digest can generate about Ten Views and Four Reads in a typical month.  So for the most part, I present and nobody interacts., 

The little I read on Twitter, a site severely rationed and often put on hiatus for days to weeks at a time, comes from posters with serious followings, Somebody's of name if not facial recognition generated from a position external to Twitter.  While there are now Social Media Influencers with FB and Twitter or TikTok as their entry to fame, I do not know who they are.  I do know who got elected to office, or ran but failed to received a majority vote, who wrote a book, who starred in a movie or TV show, and who has a column in a national periodical.  Those are the people whose stats calculate far in excess of mine.

It is easy to get lured into the false impression that Social Media provides mass entry into the public forum.  True, one can express a thought without having an editor select which of many are worthy of his readers.  But the selectivity of the editor greatly augments the number of readers.  There is something a little degenerate about my few dozen Twitter followers who follow 4000 other Nobody's but only have 40 people following them.

Perhaps the real benefit, maybe even the purpose, is to overwhelm the screens with whatever people may think with no expectation of readership, or even the false illusion of readership.  It reinforces what my teachers tried to convey from the earliest grades, think a problem through, express it with vivid wording, and you will be able to think any problem through.  The beneficiary is the writer, not the reader.  Or a variant of that from my best Rabbi's, you do and say honorable things not for people of the public to admire you but for you to admire you.

So my public impact remains one notch beneath paltry.  My ability to take an idea and run with it is still at a level my teachers hoped it would be, even in the absence of serious interaction.