Apology function

Digital media and wanting or not wanting

Back when blogs were ubiquitous the thing that irritated me the most about them was how many posts would begin with the author apologizing for not having updated recently enough. "I meant to post the pumpkin patch snaps but Harold had a toothache," "I've been so busy caring for my six children that I have fallen behind on flogging their images," and so on.

Note how rarely this happens with newsletters, and never with social media stardom. Instagram is waning a little as far as producing income for its professionals, I hear, but this particular aspect doesn't seem to have changed. People don't apologize for not posting on Instagram or Tiktok because they never don't post. In fact, they want Instagram or TikTok to apologize to them, for not showing posts or something.

Substacks seem to follow a similar sort of logic because they are push media. When a newsletter writer "publishes" a newsletter, it doesn't sit at a destination visited optionally by a reader who might reasonably be disappointed by the absence of a new thing to read. Instead it goes to them and becomes a digital object that has to be handled in some way—read, marked as read, deleted, forwarded, archived, possibly even filtered out automatically.

It wouldn't make emotional sense to apologize for not thrusting something in someone's face that they have to deal with. Not that I ever liked the apologies—I just noticed when they were gone because it seemed to mark a quite radical shift in the directionality of this messaging. You came to me, now I have arrived at you.

I've posted kind of a lot about this shift and how pleasurable I find it to construct a little online edifice where people can come and visit, if they like, or simply neither know about nor visit. But as time goes on I see how newsletters are generating new types of conflict for me. Years ago I wrote a piece for The Guardian about great literary newsletters ("Why 2015 Was the Year of the Newsletter" lmao) and that's how I became friends with Charlotte (Shane, fabulous author) in the first place.

She was on Tinyletter back then and is now on Substack, I think, and I never do not want to receive messages from her. But a message from Charlotte Shane is a privilege and there is a very big difference between her and the vast, vast majority of everybody else who writes in English. She's talked in various places about how Tinyletter gave her a modicum of safety and privacy because she knew the email addresses of everybody who signed up.

The form is morphing a little bit in that people now post links to public newsletters on social media, the same way that they might previously link to their own blogs, which is odd. Substack also has some kind of notes function that provides an internal social media aspect to it, popularity rankings and the like. It makes gamified business sense and I'm sure it gives a kind of emotional logic to using the platform that other media used to provide and now don't.

The social-ification of newsletters in this form rather hollows that modicum of safety and privacy out of it. Certainly it seems that the difference now between a blog post and a newsletter is simply the follow function—one sits alone and impervious and the other has a measurable quantity of attention. You can see how many people open the newsletter.

Why? For those who can monetize, it is obviously a more precise measure of attention. X number follow, Y number open, Z number pay to subscribe. I'm not sure that this kind of metric generalizes to influence, though, at the level of culture. Follower counts in the context of Instagram are notorious for a very good reason—anybody who chases them must be distorting their presentation in favor of acquisition, which usually makes the product worse.

Emotional logic to publishing has been on my mind because I've been weighing up what I can and cannot do without. Not what I can or cannot do, because not "posting" makes me insane. But what I can't do without. Now that I can completely produce the podcast Charlotte and I make by myself, I know with certainty that I can't do without it. I definitely can't do without this blog. Now that Danny has a baby and has to prioritize writing for money it's feeling quieter and weirder and, for me, no worse for it. When he comes by it's a wonderful event and when he doesn't I don't mind.

Some kinds of voluntary work, which is really what I'm talking about, I realize, I could probably do without. There is a quantity of volunteering I do that benefits publishing that I'm not sure actually benefits me all that much, now that I need money more than I did for a while, but I'm not actually sure. I need to feel that I am giving. Posting is not giving. But nonprofit volunteering outside publishing, which I certainly do eg: in education, is difficult also to justify—because it has no bearing on my actual "career" it feels even more indulgent, even if the giving is made purer by the same token.

If there is a center to this cloud of thoughts it's that there is always some unconscious expectation of what will follow the publication of a thought, or the accomplishment of an action, and when it isn't money it's something else and emotional in nature and emotions have their own logic. (Influence is not something that you can quantify in truth and experience tells me that you accrue it most meaningfully when it is not your goal at all, because people can tell and also because it probably should be a millstone, a weight you have to bear in order to get your work done.)

Come to me because I won't go to you—this is something that matters to me not because I despise attention but because the reader I respect the most is the maximally free reader. Okay, that's helpful to realize! There was a point after all. When you are writing for people and not for machines the nature of the attention actually matters quite a lot and when it is freely directed it matters most.