I am too a special snowflake
One of the art bloggers I read is having a bit of a hissy about negative criticism from commenters (not going to link — blog feuds are the lowest form of traffic whoring). Made me think for the umpty-umpth time about how big the internet is. And how, on the one hand, it allows any old Joe Schmoe to show his wares to the world. On the other, it allows any old Joe Schmoe to find your stuff and inform you that it sux dix.
Even harder to take, though — it puts you in direct competition with, like, the whole world. If you’re a one in a million talent, there are still thousands of others in your league. I don’t care how good you are — If you don’t find trawling the internet humbling, you don’t go to enough places.
Long ago on the header of Christopher Taylor’s blog, he said there were 90 million blogs on the ‘net. I don’t know where he got that number, but I suspect it got away from him pretty quick (like McDonald’s — remember when the signs bragged about the actual number of millions of burgers sold? Eventually, they gave up and put “metric asswad burgers sold”). That was a pretty daunting competition then, whatever it is now.
I got curious about the current number of connected world citizens, but I’m not good at math (I think “umpty-umpth” and “metric asswad” are actual mathematical concepts). So check me here. Wikipedia says the world population is 7.1 billion of which 61% are not using the internet. So, that means 39% are using the internet, and 39% of 7.1 billion is…2.77 billions, yes? Which looks like 2,770,000,000 writ out with all them zeroes, yes? And if you’re a picture blog, you’re pretty much accessible to all of them, regardless of language.
I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty easy to find people who don’t like your stuff.
March 12, 2014 — 11:45 pm
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