Rather than go point-for-point in reply (which I actually find annoying, confrontational and an alarmingly unnatural way to communicate), I’ll just do what I do, which is wander off on whatever tangents and impulses pop into my head while following up on your (as always) excellent comments. Call it The Dialogue of Free Association, much more inspired by the meandering and impulsive nature of a conversation among friends gathered in the kitchen at a party, than by any pretentious sophistry being passed off as “debate” (which online folks are, sorry, pathetically bad at anyway…)
You say you have a love-hate thing with the net.
I can sure relate to that, little sister. I was one of those late arrivals who refused to learn even the basics of web usage until sometime around 2011; but prior to that time I had allowed myself to build up an illusory notion of what one might be able to accomplish with the thing.
When I did finally tune in and see at a glance how much reckless, useless and intentionally divisive content was in circulation, and how the thing already seemed to have divided itself up into rival camps and factions all gleefully accusing each other of all the evil in the universe, oddly enough I wasn’t as surprised as I might have thought I would be.
After a lifetime of seeing most folks preferring to be shallow and trivializing assholes as much as they could get away with, I realized that the perennial snark and preferential tribalism of the net was just more of the same dismissive sarcasm and sleazy groupie approval-seeking as I’d already found civilization to be all along, in those fake-revolutionary sixties and aggressively irreverent seventies I had grown up in.
Why should I have expected an online world to be any different?
So one of the first things I realized about how I might make some use of this thing without being overwhelmed by it, was to part company with the idea right away, that I could use it somehow to make any money.
Every avenue I pursued to find out about these so-called fortunes being amassed, every attempt to decode gobbledygookish jargonia like “content marketing” and “lead generation” and “search engine optimization”, all put together made me realize that the way to make money on the web is to do nothing whatsoever, to have nothing at all but a fictitious “personal brand” to market, and to join in a headlong stampede of fraud and fiction passing itself off as “entrepeneurship” while learning the ways and means of the most massive pyramid scheme in human history in order to grab some money out of the stream before it floats away and someone else grabs it instead. And every last cent of it being tracked and aggressively taxed by a greedy and hostile regime, in the faustian bargain.
“A tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, I believe one genuine writer once said….
I also find that what this internet has done both to the craft of being a published author and of being a circulated journalist, is beyond unconscionable.
Forty years ago it was unthinkable, that a reporter with any self-respect might take out a personal classified ad saying little more than “look at me, I’m a great guy today, just like I reported I was yesterday; stay tuned and I’ll tell you tomorrow that I’m still just a super person….”
It is laughable, undignified, unprofessional, astonishingly juvenile and an absolute self-destruction of the craft of journalism, to have everyone in the trade altering themselves into this revolting “personal brand” thing.
There is no hope whatsoever of any such creature ever reporting a story fairly or accurately, and true to form few even pretend this is the journalist’s mission any more.
Same with the published author.
Instead of an honorable process of submissions and queries and being approved for publication based on one’s actual linguistic and/or academic skills, now an author is nothing but anyone that some “content curator” supposes will circulate well via Amazon and farcebook in order to generate leads and clicks for their advertisers.
And the writing one sees online, every day, reflects this: bad to worse to unreadably farcical, is what gets published by paying venues, while one must scour the web continually to find anyone with any kind of real writing skills at all.
Mostly I find that the ones who aren’t even interested in making anything on their writing, are by far the most effective communicators of all.
So I strive, currently with my “art of the reply” approach, to be one of that latter set of writers. I couldn’t care less how many “k followers” I have.
I’d prefer to be read and appreciated by five attentive and thoughtful people, than scanned and ridiculed and later misquoted and preached about by five thousand or fifty thousand surfers. I think of it as in a similar vein to those eloquent personal letters which survive through history and come to illuminate events in such a meaningfully personal way, mostly letters written to an audience of one, but in a voice which indicates that good language and good thinking are simply a measure of one’s personal dignity and self-respect, regardless of how many or how few ever see them.
So the “love” part of this love-hate thing, is I love to make my little paper ships like this and float them down the current to one more person, you in this instance, and let them make of them what they will. The activity gives me great pleasure.
On the other hand, the “hate” component has always come from my trying to write for an audience and have it be read widely. Between idiotic comments showing they never read the piece at all, and reactionary invective showing that the only reason they did was to pick at it like an infected scab until it bleeds, just out of sheer sadistic lust to ridicule another, I soon found out that trying to write anything other than interpersonal dialogue with a disinterested public simply looking on, really had no appeal for me at all.
I already have a job anyway, an IRL one, where I am absolute master of my own day’s work, done my own way and with only one client at a time to please with it, and I’ve been at those pursuits for nearly forty years. This web thing has less than nothing to do with it. It was a mistake coming in, to think I could expect any result other than new forms of pastimes from this silly gimmick anyway.
