In recent years I have had something to say of how the web seems to be working--and who it seems to be working for. As the reader may guess this has not been unconnected with the fact that, as this blog and my working papers show, I publish very heavily online, making what people look for and find online of more than casual interest to me. Indeed, personal experience was what ultimately led me to taking a more academic interest in the topic, while that experience also validated what many others have said about the web we used to have, and the web we have now, in what I have called its "Maximum Era."
So did it go when recently checking Google Search Console's "Insights" regarding the Google search traffic that brought Internet users to this blog in the last twelve months. Far and away the thing most likely to bring this blog readers was my writing about Monsieur Paul Flart, and right after that, the paperback action-adventure fiction imprint Gold Eagle and its shuttering about a decade ago.
My writing about movies also gets some attention. The principal draw is the box office analysis--as with what I have had to say about the Deadline magazine Most Valuable Blockbuster tournaments (or in this year's case, its non-appearance), with the interest in some of what I thought of as only short-term surprisingly enduring. Even though Black Panther 2 and The Marvels came out back in 2022-2023 people still end up here looking for analysis of their box office performance--and what I wrote about the 2024 Twisters still gets looked at too. There is also my writing about those movies that haven't happened. Thus do people come here following up the reports about the Jack Ryan movies that never got made, like that The Cardinal of the Kremlin movie that would have brought Harrison Ford and William Shatner together in the same film, and the reports of a Debt of Honor movie we heard back in 2023--which I suspect will never amount to anything either--and of course, my thoughts about what the makers of a movie adaptation of The Honourable Schoolboy would have to cope with in getting the movie made (which I wrote about not because it seemed to be happening but precisely because it wasn't happening, because it looked like the movie producers of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy were skipping over it to go straight to Smiley's People, not that that happened either). Quite a few people also come here looking to see if there is a Bad Teacher 2 out or in the works. (Could it possibly be that this is one Hollywood sequel people really do want to see?) And the piece I wrote comparing Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer to Ridley Scott's Napoleon still gets an occasional glance.
My writing about books and TV also accounts for a lot of the traffic, in that order. It is mostly the writing about fiction that seems to command some interest--in the main my reviews of old spy novels, particularly those of Robert Ludlum (The Aquitaine Progression , especially), Frederick Forsyth and Clive Cussler, with the many reviews of James Bond continuation novels I have up here getting some, but on the whole less, attention. The reviews of techno-thrillers get still less attention than that--though some people have found their way here looking for a review of Harold Coyle's Trial by Fire. Meanwhile the TV writing that principally catches people's eye had to do with Hallmark's offerings, especially my bit about its cosy mysteries, like the Morning Show, Matchmaker, Crossword and Hailey Dean series', and my pieces about Baywatch, and Flatland, and Unhappily Ever After (and so too, I guess, Warehouse 13, given all those who come here wanting to know if H.G. Wells really had a sister).
The more evidently "highbrow" and essayistic, ideas-oriented stuff doesn't do as well. Still, my review of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction and piece about Angus Calder's The People's War have drawn some readers--as, in a lighter vein, so has Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain. My reviews of and essays about literary fiction predictably get less attention than what I write about more popular fiction, but people looking for information about Shintaro Ishihara and his "novel" Season of the Sun do wind up here with some regularity (if, I think, less because of the literary interest of his books than because of his political career), and Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet , end up here every so often. My pieces on Umberto Eco's "The Myth of Superman," Dwight MacDonald's discussion of MassCult," Stanley Kubrick's discussion of his political views circa the time of A Clockwork Orange get glances now and then as well. So does the discussion of Alan Moore's critical remarks about fandom and the comic book superhero genre, just what it is that "makes a famous person a celebrity"--and of course, the annoyances of a college composition class for the student much more often than not usually compelled to take it. Once in a while people also look at what I have had to say about particular usages and phrases--for instance, politics as "Show Business for ugly people," the etymology and significances of "badass," the irritatingly Wildeian "Expect the unexpected." And let us not forget the interest in why Hollywood makes it seem as if adroitness with chopsticks is the norm rather than the exception among North Americans.
It is also the case that it helps that things I wrote about that weren't topical at the time becoming topical later has a lot to do with their chances of getting some attention. Certainly the release and reception of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has had people coming here wanting to know about the origin of Homer Simpson's name, and taking a few more glances at the review of Cussler's Trojan Odyssey specifically. Likewise Vanity Fair's piece about Loelia Ponsonby from a while back had people's keyword searches bringing them this way (though in at least one case the searchers found their way here tracing the characteristically mean-spirited remark attributed to her, but more famously uttered by one Margaret Thatcher). If the interest in the box office performance of Black Panther 2 has endured due to the continued output, and troubles, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe it has pointedly spiked recently--as it happens, in the wake of Disney-Marvel's announcement of its intention to have Black Panther 3 out in December 2028. (It also seems no coincidence that the piece about why college students can't stand composition tends to get more traffic in the early part of the college semester--or that the review of Coyle's Trial by Fire is attracting more attention given recent headlines . . .)
As anyone who has read much of what I have here may have noticed, some of the pieces that get the most attention are frankly marginal to what this blog is "about" (like the career aspirations of would-be professional flatulists). And altogether if much of what is being looked is the kind of thing I write about, it is a limited portion of the total, as the rest gets a lot less notice, at least from this avenue. One can shrug at that and talk about the "Pareto principle"--the idea that twenty percent of anything is likely to account for about eighty percent of the result. Still, I think it is suggestive of how the Internet works. Clearly Internet search, all other things being equal, is more likely to have a satisfactory result when we are looking for proper nouns--for specific people and the titles of works of fiction and so forth--and thus privilege pursuit of the concrete over the more diffuse, the more general, the more abstract. It is also the case that this blog, being (as the generally disrespectful answer engines have told me when I asked about it) a "niche" blog rather than a Big Media operation amid this Internet Maximum Era is most likely to get attention when I think to write about something that other people aren't writing about, but which someone out there is interested in in a way that adds up to a fair number of searches over an extended period. Thus writing about, for example, Theodore Dreiser doesn't get me much in the way of the "attention economy--other people aren't writing about him, but there wouldn't be readers if there were, as things are. (David Walsh said Theodore Dreiser was a "dead dog" to the literary Establishment, and the interest I see in his "Trilogy of Desire" doesn't disprove that.) By contrast if the interest in, for example, the novels of Robert Ludlum is a long, long way from its peak, there is just enough of it left out there, and few enough people writing anything about those novels, for the interested to have a chance of ending up here. So does it go with the writing about TV, which focuses on the kind of television that usually gets ignored by the prestige TV-loving coastal elite "cool kids" who dominate the entertainment press because the shows are unfashionable (as with Hallmark) or old (like Baywatch) or simply never got much notice (like Flatland and Unhappily Ever After). It also matters that every now and then I venture an "unpopular opinion" about the subjects I write about. (How else would anyone interested in The Sopranos end up here? Meanwhile if people come here looking to see how Twisters really did, that seems to me suggestive of their, quite naturally, not buying the upbeat media narrative given the gap between their claims about what a big hit it was, and the actual numbers we saw.)
And yes, it seems to me symbolic of the state of the culture today that Paul Flart is this blog's biggest draw these days. Even where it comes to their "disposable," more recreational, Internet searching it is decidedly not intellectuals who prevail among the Internet usership, such that a far greater audience is interested in the doings of Mr. Flart than those of Mr. Cowperwood.
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