DOES THE SIZE OF YOUR AUDIENCE REALLY MATTER?

What is so irksome about a pop star accepting an award, leaning into the mic with some perfectly prepared sound bite about how “they would rather have twelve REAL fans than 12 million followers”? Seriously — how many people need to appreciate your work for you to feel satisfied? What is more important to you, sheer numbers or critical approval? For the past few months, I have been talking with people about the dilemma of measuring success.

2,000 years ago I was fresh out of film school, working as a cinematographer and somehow found myself shooting a 35mm theatrical feature. My name was in goddamn Variety! Sure, the budget was ultra-low, the director was a first-timer and the story was an X-rated dystopian mess — but come on, who cares about all that. I already had a plucky nickname at the camera rental house, and there were giant rolls of film stock Kodak had set aside for me. I could walk into any room and imagine the hushed whispers. “You know, his name was in Variety last week and he’s only 21.” I felt a profound satisfaction from that naïve impulse, and I cannot say it was a completely negative act. Mostly, I was misleading myself. (My name has never been in Variety again, by the way. If that matters at all, is the question.)

So, let’s imagine you have created a minor masterpiece after hacking away, following your fickle muse and burning the midnight oil, long after the kids have gone to bed. You wake up after a few hours of satisfied sleep, hustle to the day job, and then come back to chip away at your Giaconda. And then somehow — it is finally birthed, finished. You step back, as a perfect life moment presents itself. You know that it is real, that it works, that it has legs to run on all by itself. This is no half-baked beginner shit like you used to make. This is that slow and majestic triumph you have been working towards for a decade or two. And then you put it out into the world. You ask people to buy it for a reasonable price. You go to sleep imagining perfect strangers stumbling across it and writing an ecstatic five-star review on Amazon. But, what happens next is the ugly truth of our age. Sure, we can blame it on Facebook algorithms and the cacophony of social media that people live in 24/7 — but your masterpiece sells 50 copies, or has a handful of views, and languishes in the darkest shadows of the internet within days. The only people that make comments — well, you know all of them, and on your worst, defeated days their words feel like charity. The thing is, they are not. There is nothing wrong with knowing who they are. These are the people that get you. Some might call them your tribe.

Are you jealous of the “influencers” out there, who garner millions of views for the cotton candy they pass off as storytelling? In my weakest moments, I describe them as the root of a problem (but that is just a great way to sound dismissive and like an old fart). In reality, they have the complete and utter freedom to take a shit on the living room floor and call it art or video-blogging or social commentary, and if people want to support that and put them on a pedestal, well — I can just keep driving. Nothing to see here, just a YouTube accident. The thing about these meta-media darlings is that many of them are miserable. Millions of followers and they are crying on their exclusive SUPREME sleeves. We should pity them, actually. They have no fickle muse to challenge them until the day they die. They are just chasing the ghosts in their machines.

In this new age, nothing can become something and something can very easy become nothing. We are not going to wind the internet back up in the middle of the night and wake up to find a ghosted, empty space in the living room where it used to be. Sheer numbers of likes and follows and shares are just too random to quantify. I am constantly shocked by how many social interactions I have these days that are actually with bots. We all need to take a major step back and remind ourselves that just because you have images in a “gallery” on Flickr, that experience is not even a flimsy approximation of a real-life gallery show. If a free, online gallery experience was anything like the real thing, there would be old friends that hug you with wild abandon as they congratulate you, there would be a stale glass of white wine dangling from one of your hands, and you could catch your sweetheart’s secret smile from across the room — that is a gallery show, with everyone bathing in the afterglow of your images as they stand like monuments for a week or two on clean white walls, and then get taken down and replaced by someone else’s triumphs. I think the term “virtual” is a shitty trick we play on ourselves. These no-barrier-to-entry experiences and interactions we get suckered into are not even wildly similar to their real-life counterparts. But now, we chat and text instead of pick up the phone. We “attend” virtual film festivals. We witness live feeds on webcams and are told “we are there”. Sometimes I just want to pull the plug on everything and talk to someone across a cup of coffee. Nothing in our world is as redemptive as that. NOTHING.

It is only by connecting and engaging with your audience, your tribe — that is when the real measurement happens. Of course, we all want fame of some kind, let’s call it “notoriety” if that sounds better. That day my name was in Variety, it gave me the few extra pounds of confidence that I needed back then. We are just human after all, and if we find ourselves with “just” 20 loyal viewers we will be hungry for 100 the next day. I do not think we will ever get around that base desire — but knowing that this craving is born from greed and ambition — in our random, clickbait-obsessed world, that may help us with the inevitable fallout.

I want to believe I have found a way to ignore the noise, the constant buzz of personal-brand, meta-nothingness. I WANT TO LOOK AT MY TRIBE IN THE EYE, AND SAY THANK YOU. If the pop-star intended it or not, maybe that seductive sound bite was right and twelve real fans is all we actually need. The rest is just bullshit.