To my intense lack of interest some county-named family has returned to the UK from the USA. And the correct response is surely, “Who cares?” Just like I don’t in a passionately concerned sort of way – if that makes any sense at all.
As a life-long republican – as witness a rabble-rousing anti-monarchist essay written when I was seven for my Standard Three primary school teacher, and read at the time (I was told years later) by my father and my teacher with whoops of hilarious joy by both of them.
Although stopping short of wanting to see the lot of them (the royal family, and not my parents and teachers) lined up against a wall and shot, I do want to see their status and position, titles and privileges abolished. I want an elected head of state, and not an hereditary one. I want The House of Lords abolished and replaced by an elected Senate or equivalent, and this is not what I wanted to talk about – important though it is.
No, what interested me (via an informative article in The Guardian) was what That Family is going to do in Britain given that Everyone is a Creator Nowadays.
Take this blog for example. During the course of its existence, more than one and half million people have looked at something in it. That is an astonishing figure, made even more astonishing by the choice of People over which blogs they find the most interesting. A blog title called “Fish and Rain” has garnered more views than anything else and, while anyone reading anything that I write is gratifying, it is still mystifying why that particular blog has been singled out. Strange indeed are the ways of the Blog Reading Public.
However, the figures are astonishing for a retired English teacher living in Catalonia who does not make a determined effort to maximize his audience at every opportunity and relies solely on the written word to get his ‘message’ across - and someone who has been very lax in his posting over the last couple of years.
Anyone and everyone can (and does) post. Content is no longer limited to the professionals, indeed for some people the more amateur the efforts the better as long as they are in bite-sized bits and can be scrolled through with alacrity. And AI is waiting in the wings, or is already centre stage, to help massage content to make it more clickable.
Does this access suggest that Content production is becoming more democratic? I would point to the Internet and the experience of researchers who try and use it for ‘real’ knowledge rather than personal opinion stuck together with AI help by some teenager (or younger) in Idaho which looks professional but lacks a basic integrity as far as the information is concerned.
Money does make a difference, as witness the life of the vacuous documentary focussing on the illegal immigrant wife of a lying, corrupt, sex-pest in what remains (apt word) of The White House. In spite of garnering a ZERO stars review in The Guardian and going on to become a total bomb, it did reach an audience of sorts, well outside its merits.
Most content is not backed by such shameless sycophancy and blatant corruption, although that does bring us back to the County Family that I started with. They have fame (or infamy) and public recognition, but their Content has to survive in a world awash with alternatives. It will be interesting to see how they survive (and what means they adopt to do it) in a world jostling with Watch Me Read Me in superabundance.
Though, it would be nice, if you could continue reading my blog!
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