My Road to Clap Agnosticism

Mac McCarty
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Motivation vs. meh…

As Ev said here, “There is actually a lot of deep thinking behind the system, which is non-intuitive.” At first, I was skeptical, but I also admit that’s my default response to just about everything I encounter online. Welcome to the 21 century!

Pros & Cons

Applause is a funny thing. During my 50yrs as a musician I personally came to experience hand clapping as a thing most meaningful in absence. Applause is a reflexive response to performance and, whatever value it may itself have is as nothing compared to pouring one’s heart into performance and then receiving none. Applause itself is open to all sorts of interpretations, but the meaning of the absence of applause is abundantly clear.

Of course, over my half-century of music, not every performance merited applause. Moreover, many of those performances were never intended to elicit applause. One thing I can say about all of it: the music I played and the applause itself were equally fleeting. Both radiated pressure waves into the atmosphere as sound and were eventually reduced by entropy to mere Brownian molecular motion — forever irretrievable. Oh, perhaps .01% of the music I played was recorded, but all the rest vanished within moments of impinging on the air. The same is true of the applause.

As much as I had hoped to escape this fleetfulness by writing, I have to admit that it applies all to well to writing online. Archives (God love ’em) aside, writing on the internet has become performance — a headline glimpsed through the window of speeding train — a window of exposure sometimes smaller than a keyhole. At least ink-on-dead-trees writing produces a physical artifact. Since online writing is frequently reduced to performance, applause seems apt. If both vanish into the Brownian motion of the digital archive, so be it — accept one’s rewards as they are offered, I always say.

But there is also a downside. I have, for instance, watched promising young painters abandon their solitary art and craft in favor of performance art. To the otherwise isolated, applause can become a drug of addiction. Writers, I suspect, are not immune.

That said, there’s also the generally positive affect applause has on motivation. Some writers will get addicted to the “rush” while others will just feel socially reinforced in their otherwise isolated toil. Who am I to judge?

As a reader, I’ve come to see the appeal. I have often felt that more than a single positive click did a very effective job of expressing my gut reaction to something I read here. “Likes,” to me, are for Facebook posts and mainly the function as affirmation that I’ve seen something. (In fact, I deliberately forego their emojis because they introduce semantic implications.) When I literally like a piece on Medium, I do often feel the need to do more than just acknowledge it, while many times I feel a written response is hardly called for.

So, as a reader the applause button now provides me a way of satisfying my gut desire to express appreciation — even if I remain unclear about exactly what it means. But as a platform, I can’t imagine how Medium expects to quantize our claps. Fortunately, as both reader and writer, that’s not my problem.

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