Back in the early 90s when I ran a dial-up BBS in a small town, I would have been surprised and happy if one of the many shareware files on the BBS was ever downloaded more than one or two hundred times. Today, I see how many times the high-res versions of my photos on morgueFile have been downloaded -- around 175,000 -- and feel disappointed.
When I first started writing novels in the late 70s (yeah, yeah... showing how old I am), I would have been very happy if I could have had even a couple dozen people read what I'd written, and all of them would have been local to me. Now, the first novel that I published on Amazon has been downloaded for free thousands of times by people all over the world (you can get a copy via the
link in this thread) -- but I'm disappointed.
As recently as the beginning of this century, I could have reasonably reached out to a hundred people or so, maybe a little more. Now, with multiple social networks, I can reach out to thousands in my first and second degrees of separation. Yet... I'm disappointed my reach is so limited.
I was always a little fish in a big sea, and I'm still a little fish, but maybe I'm just more aware of it now. Celebrities like Emma Watson can potentially influence millions of people with a single Tweet. A popular author like Hugh Howey can post something on Wattpad and potentially have tens of thousands of people reading it in a matter of minutes or hours. I'm not even in the same ballpark... but I know people with less "reach" than what I have, so I can intellectually say that it's all a matter of scale... and still feel disappointed.
The passage of time, the advancement of technology, and the increase in a person's potential global reach can sure shift a person's perceptions.
(Just some ramblings....)
Is it really all a matter of scale though? I can understand your desire to be able to reach more people - it's a validation of sorts - but isn't who you reach equally, if not more, important? I mean, would you really be happy reaching the same millions of people that Emma Watson reaches? Wouldn't the message you have for them have to be different, and would you want it to be, just for the opportunity to reach them?
It's perhaps a bit off-topic here, but this kind of reminds me of something Noam Chomsky often says: he started out giving his public presentations to a couple of neighbors here and there, and later maybe in a church with some four people attending - the priest, one or two people that wandered in from outside to escape the cold, and someone who wanted to kill him.
Needless to say how popular he and his message is now - many, many decades after he first started.
