Make Up Your Mind, Medium
Like most people, I have no clear idea how Medium generates its feeds: the stuff that appears in the “newsletter” that comes into my email inbox is somewhat different than the stuff that comes up in the app on my phone. To be fair, it is a mix of authors who I have followed, authors that I have read, and then there’s that weird mix of stuff we think you might like with just the seemingly random.
All well and good and expected in today’s algorithmically enhanced, well, everything. This was not what I thought we were going to get when we were headed into curation, but I think that might be my GenX preference for people: I don’t know that younger users care or think that lists curated by people look or “feel” different than lists generated by algorithms. (To my mind, there is a kind of weird synchronistic-stochastic alchemy that occurs in the human brain that tends to make its pattern-matching/making just that bit more compelling.)
What I do not expect is contradiction, though I do appreciate it, intended or not. The first post above tells me to stop writing books and to focus on newsletters. The second post is one of those encouraging me to write books driven by market research. It’s sort of the exact opposite of why I write books: I write them because something so profoundly interests me that I am willing to dedicate untold hours of my time to figure it out and another set of untold hours to try to communicate it to an audience of however many people might be interested.
That is, for me, writing is about learning, which I also understand is something of a luxury, since I have a regular (if also indifferent) job that puts food on the table and a roof over my head. I approach books—and writing in general but especially books—as a particular kind of commodity, as something precious, special, particular, which reflects a kind of classism built into my worldview. I do not think of books as commodities purely generated for profit, and yet that is exactly what they are. Or at least it is part of what they always have been: Gutenberg was looking to cover his losses from having gotten the date wrong for another enterprise.
I think I’m willing to let go my bourgeois notions of books as special more quickly than Medium can streamline its algorithm to offer me less schizophrenic results. We live in an age of adaptation, where mental agility is required of us all. Even algorithms.
