I remember when I launched my first websites. I was nine or ten years old. At the bottom of each site I installed a “view counter”.

Youngsters may not remember these, but they were the Google Analytics of their day. They measured every time a page loaded, and displayed the number for all to see. Every day I would check my counter, and every day it would creep up by four or five views.

When I got into blogging, the number of visitors went from a handful to dozens, and I thought I was at the top of the world. Then, it got into the hundreds, and the thousands. I come from a town of 10,000, so 10,000 always seemed like a big number to me. When one of my blogs hit 10,000, I thought wow, my audience is the size of my entire town.

Little did I know.

Working on the web gives you perspective. I’ve seen traffic sources (cough, cough, Reddit) send 150,000 views in a single day. I’ve seen the miniscule profits that a website serving 20,000 visitors a month can earn, and I’ve come to see even numbers like 1 million as small. The medium-sized publishing companies of 2016 bring in 100 million impressions per month. DeRay McKesson’s twitter account brings in 150 million impressions per month. 1 million people in one place is uncomprehendable in scale. The numbers are so large, and yet the value of all these hundreds of millions of views is so small.

So, I’ve had to reclassify how I define value. I take pride in having helped more than a million people with their tech problems. I take pride in saving people time, and providing millions of good short stories to eager readers. I still don’t know what value is though, what it means on the web, and how to classify each of my efforts. All I know is that 10,000, big enough to fill many arenas, is very small.

For a few months now, I’ve had this urge to write again. When a publication invited me to write something though, the words just wouldn’t come out. Every few weeks something would come up organically, and I would write about it, but otherwise my keyboard was silent.

Looking back, I’ve realized that this stems from how generally sour I’ve become on media. Most of it, op-eds, articles, videos, is just noise. Most of the assignments I’ve been given have amounted to “Make noise”, “React”, “Write a headline to waste someone’s time”, “Make them click”, and I’m just not for that anymore. I’ve only been able to write when I actually had something to say.

90% of online writing nowadays is superfluous. It’s driven by editors who demand their writers play catchup with competitors. It’s driven by Facebook ads, and meaningless word wars. Another 8% is people writing about things they don’t know about. 2% remains for original writing. That’s the 2% I love, and the 2% I want to continue doing.

Today I took a long Uber ride, and my driver happened to be listening to some progressive radio station. Every few minutes he’d hear something and nod “Uh huh” or “Damn right”. Meanwhile, I sat and listened in stunned silence.

I couldn’t comment, for fear of it lowering my Uber rating (it matters), but this show was one of the most delusional and dissapointing things I’ve heard in my political life.

Even as a Conservative, I’ve always recognized that Conservative radio has its share of crazy conspiracy theories. This experience confirmed to me for the first time though that there’s full parity in crazyness. Both sides really do have crazy, delusional images of the other side.

On this show, I learned of “the defintive evidence that Donald Trump is being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin” and that’s it a certainty that we’ll be at war with Iran or North Korea within the year. Oh, and Donald Trump promised his boss Putin (through Rex Tillerson, “Putin’s righthand man”) the right to invade all the baltic states. I’m not kidding! This is what the radio host claimed, and my Uber driver believed every word.

This is the sort of discourse that I find dangerous. It sets up the other side as more than a political opponent. It sets them up as a devlish ideological enemy, never to be trusted. From a partisan standpoint, it makes sense. Scare your audience away from every leaving you. This sort of thing is damaging to Democracy though.

I saw a very interesting question on an internship application today: “How would you describe social media to your grandparents in 3 sentences?”

My first instincts for this were to make an analogy to a village. I don’t have a version of this answer saved, but it compared Facebook to a village square, and other social networks to common gathering places like the local school, the pub, and the home. It was an interesting analogy, but after reading it, all I could think is “Great. But what’s social media?”

While that answer sort of encompassed the mechanisms of social media, it wasn’t very helpful for introducing novices to social media.

So I started again.

This time I asked “What affordances can I use grandma knows and are most closely related to social media?”

Communication mediums. My grandma knows the telephone, and the letter, and the newspaper, and even email to an extent (though I felt this might be a stretch for grandmas, so I decided not to rely on them knowing what email was).

By using these, I was able to craft an answer that was less reliant on connecting some weird analogy and reality. I’m still going to work on it some (I’d like it to be 80 words or less), but I think it’s a lot better than it was.

Here are my three sentences:

• “Social media” is nothing more than the internet’s combination of all the communication tools you’re used to, sped up and personalized to your tastes. The most popular “social network”, Facebook, is a bit like a real-time newspaper written for you, with photos and stories from your friends, family, and favorite celebrities. You can contribute to this by sharing your own photos or stories, or you can use one-to-one social networks ( which are more like a letter or a phone call) to chat privately with your friends.