The 1 Way to Get Readers to Share Your Web Content

It’s been fascinating to watch online media start to treat readers the way politicians treat voters: by their demographics, and little else. For years candidates have been cobbling together coalitions by choosing policy positions according to their constituents’ backgrounds. Appeal to voters’ identities and you’ll appeal to their support.

Websites are now doing the same. On the websites that chase pageviews the way politicians chase skirts, there’s been a new genre of post: the demolisticle. It plays on a reader’s most basic identity—race, hometown, age, marital status, etc.—to narrate an experience that is guaranteed to resonate in some way. It’s the horoscope of online content: proffer enough and something’s bound to be true.

Sasha Weiss, writing in The New Yorker in 2012, pinpointed Buzzfeed’s genius before most. Citing James Wood’s writing on How Fiction Works, Weiss notes that Buzzfeed’s best pieces derive their genius from fiction’s “thisness.”

Woods writes: 

By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concreteness

It’s no coincidence that “This!” has become a hallmark of Millennial web commentary, a way of expressing the overwhelming applicability of whatever one’s responding to. Anyone who’s spent a nice tossing and turning next to his partner knows something about this, from Buzzfeed’s “24 Most Underrated Parts of Being Single:” 

9. You don’t have to share the bed with some jerk who hogs the sheets.

The best demolisticles are the ones that recognize that all we want is for somebody to recognize us for who we are, and who we used to be. How can we not share something that so fully encompasses our most cherished selves? How can we not vote for it by pressing the like button?

Some belated processing of ‘The Master’

Finally got around to watching Joaquin Phoenix’s crooked mouth last night, and I have thoughts. Thoughts that will last a trillion years:

1.) Landry! 

2.) The only takeaway for me came in the penultimate scene, before Dodd sings his homoerotic slowjam to Freddie Quell. Dodd tells Quell that he should go off into the ocean, be a seaman, truly live the unmastered life, and report back what that feels like. The true master – I’d even contend the titular master – is Freddie. Dodd is a slave to illusion; Freddie is a slave only to himself, which also makes him his own master. This is what Dodd has ostensibly chased, but is too weak to find.

3.) But why wait until the final five minutes of the movie to actually give the audience something to think about? Because “The Master,” as turgid and shapeless as it is, is structured and fashioned after Dodd’s work.

4.) Think back to that conspicuous set piece in Phoenix, in which Quell beats up the lame dude in the suit and hat. “What do you think of the book?” Quell asks (at least as I remember it; paraphrasing). “He’s a mystic, but if it were up to me I’d edit it down to three pages and hand it out as a pamphlet.” Quell then beats him senseless.

5.) Religion, like art, is composed of message and atmospherics. Some just want the takeaway, the thesis, the sermon. But full commitment, full suspension of disbelief (whether in a pew or a seat) requires submission to the entire package. “The cause,” if you will. Anderson wants his audience to fall under a spell, even – especially – if they don’t know where it’s headed. “The Master” is Dodd’s work, Dodd’s work is “The Master.”

6.) That, at least, is the apologist’s interpretation of the movie. It was still a bear to watch. Me, I’d rather drink a milkshake.

Bridging the gun culture divide

Last week I spent 27.5 hours with a guy who owns at least a dozen guns. He had one in the trunk of my rental car. He had several in his mountain cabin we went to. It was a shotgun that had gauge adapters so it could shoot 10 different types of caliber. We shot it at some beer bottles in the woods. There was a moment that I had to go reload the targets, him with a loaded gun, me walking out in a field, a half mile from the next closest person. It was so surreal, so absurd, that I couldn’t even think about the reality of it—that he could have just killed me, without any of my recourse. I walked down, I set up the targets, and I walked back. He didn’t shoot me. Nothing but his own morality and the law kept him from doing it.

I’m not sure what that anecdote really gets at, but it’s all I can think of right now, after the Connecticut shooting. Plenty of people who have guns don’t become mass murderers. Plenty of people would be mass murderers if they only had guns. The policy goals should be to try and address the latter, I think. Does that mean an outright ban on guns? This guy didn’t use an assault rifle. He used two 9mms. 

When I was with this guy in Arizona, he and his wife both kept asking me about guns in NYC. How did I protect myself, they wanted to know, without a gun? What if something were to happen? I realized how unprepared for that conversation I was—how taken for granted gun control was in my surroundings, and how no one I’ve ever spoken to in NYC have felt so unsafe they’ve resorted to handguns (mace, maybe; but guns?). I muttered some platitude about trusting in the community, partly because I didn’t want to antagonize, and partly because what was there to say, really? We were in an anthropological exchange, essentially. Gawking at each other’s cultures, not knowing how to make sense of either’s.

There are going to be people that use today’s shooting to push more guns into classrooms, in the hope of saving kids. And there are going to be people that use today’s shooting to push more gun control into Congress, in the hope of saving kids. When those two sides talk at one another, what’s lost in translation?