Are There Too Many People on the Internet?

Online photo of a Zoom meeting of a book group.

Sometimes it’s too much.  Do you ever feel that way?  . 

You look up a book at Goodreads or LibraryThing, and realize that thousands of people are reading it, thousands have already read it, and thousands more want to read it.

If so many readers are reading it at the same time, does that mean that individuals are interchangeable?  And are we still sharing our love of books, or creating a database that enables AI and marketers to “read” readers?  (No, we’re fighting the good fight: individuals matter.)

And I am a fan of consumer reviews, whether at blogs, vlogs, or book forums. And I prefer outspoken reviewers to shills, though I am trying to tone down my candor a bit here.

It is the authors themselves who are nervous about book sites. They complain about hatchet jobs, and I cannot blame them. Yet I have found brilliant reviews of Doris Lessing’s experimental novel The Four-Gated City, and Lawrence Durrell’s lush, lyrical, strange tetraology, The Alexandria Quartet, at book sites.  It makes you happy to be on the internet after all.

So, yes, these are my people.  On a simple level, that might or not be true. 

Because so many of my favorite blogs have disappeared. Did anyone find out what happened to Dovegreyreader?  And a longtime friend deleted her blog after moving into an ALF. I begged her to keep it, but she said it was “just a lot of old opinions about books.”  I often thought of her when I blogged that year and was puzzled that she no longer commented. And then I found her obituary.

I miss the writer Robert Hellenga, who kindly agreed to a Q&A interview. He sometimes commented at my blog. But he died in 2020, the year his last novel, Love, Death & Rare Books, was published. He was an excellent novelist and a kind person.

I’m not writing for anyone in particular any more.  I stay in my corner of the blogosphere and write for myself,

There are millions of people on the internet. Did Charlton Heston say, “I am a human being!”? (Planet of the Apes?) “Soylent Green is people!” he definitely said in Soylent Green, a movie about overpopulation. (Soylent Green was very loosely based on Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room! Make Room!, which I wrote about here.)

Charlton Heston in “Soylent Green”

N.B.  The Numbers:  According to Pew Research,  96% of Americans use the internet.  And the U.S. Census Bureau says there are approximately 340,110,988 Americans.