Going viral doesn't matter

Dot dot dot ... profit?

January 16, 2023

Last week, as the random clippings of Prince Harry’s “Spare” floated by my desk (see: last week’s newsletter), one detail made me laugh. I consumed it completely out of the ether, and I haven’t started listening to the audiobook yet, so I have no idea why Harry needed to tell the world he once shopped at a discount clothing and home goods store, but presumably, it makes sense in context. The part of this anecdote that made me laugh is not imagining a Royal™ untangling last season’s Michael Kors sweaters from a pile on the floor. It’s that in the UK (and, as I’ve since learned, throughout Europe), the store Americans know as TJ Maxx is called TK Maxx. So I did what I do when I see something funny that other people might also find funny, and which is absolutely not worth writing more than a couple hundred characters, at most, about. I tweeted about it.

Let me first say that the way I use Twitter has always been haphazard at best. I have never aspired to go viral, and thankfully, it’s only happened a couple of times. I haven’t had notifications turned on for Twitter since the Obama administration, so it’s not like my phone blows up or anything. It’s more like I end up watching with some mixture of confusion and horror when the tweet in question ends up shared organically far beyond its intended audience — in the case of “TK Maxx,” that’s my audience of journalists, writers and editors who know that in draft copy, “TK” means “to come,” as in, “I will totally fill this in later.”

Side note: I was never taught the term TK in school. It’s just a thing I picked up at some point on the job from people who also probably picked it up at some point on the job, like how to spell “lede” and the way we knew precisely what time the food editor’s weekly photoshoots would end so all the broke writers could sprint up three flights of stairs, racing each other to hoover up gourmet leftovers. (RIP, Ron Mikulak, you saved lunch so many times.) Why is “to come” abbreviated “TK” and not “TC”? Up until quite recently, there were usually multiple people in any given newsroom known to have bottles of whiskey stashed in their desk drawers. Once you remember that, you kinda stop asking for these little industry quirks to make sense.

ANYWAY, hence the copyeditor joke — TK Maxx, as in, we need a different name for this store over here but we’ll just fill it in later. Also, when you consider the experience of shopping in a TJ/K Maxx, the haphazard approach to stock also lends itself well to a TK kind of experience. That’s the joke. It’s not a sophisticated joke, nor a hilarious one, but it was amusing enough, I guess, for enough fellow writers and editors to share it. And once it slips outside of your general network like that, things kinda go a little weird for a day or so, and then it’s like Twitter decides you’ve had enough and all activity on it pretty much stops. At last check, the tweet itself had a respectable 1.7 million views, hundreds of retweets and more than 8,000 little hearts, plus a couple hundred quote-tweets going — and I’m paraphrasing here, but just barely — wow, this American is stupid.

That’s the Twitter curse. I’m sure people out there have benefited from viral tweets, but I never have. We all want our writing to be read by as many people as possible, but of course, this couldn’t happen for one of my published excerpts from Runaway. (Here’s one in Lit Hub and one in Salon!) After action picked up, I did add the obligatory “buy my book!” tweet underneath the original, but I doubt Bookshop saw a spike in sales as a result. Mostly what I got was the knowledge that a couple-hundred Brits now think I’m an idiot who doesn’t know brands do business under different names in other countries, because the TK / copyeditor joke was utterly lost on those folks, apparently. It’s no skin off my nose exactly, but neither is it anything I set out to do. This is the weird thing about “engagement” — we’re told it’s what we’re supposed to be pursuing on these apps to make them work for us, but the most efficient way to court “engagement” is to make people feel indignant or outraged, which ends up feeling kinda crummy, maybe especially when you do it on accident. Even if you win — ha! — you pretty much lose, even if you only meant to make a dumb copy joke.

I had a moment to think about engagement this weekend because we left the house — in January! — to go to a comedy show. Johnny Taylor opened for Brian Posehn, and Taylor absolutely killed with a bit about the Challenger explosion. The Challenger explosion is a defining Gen X moment and our sad little childhood stories about this collective trauma will tell you everything you need to know about the younger bunch of us as a microgeneration especially. Most people remember watching the launch in the classroom because it happened on a weekday. The way I remember it we had a snow day, and because it was January, I had some half-hearted Girl Scout cookie order hustling to do. (How to compete with the girls whose parents sold the cookies for them? Impossible, best to not even try.) My big brother and I had knocked on the next-door neighbors’ door and while she found a pen to write down her name and number and modest cookie order, she invited us in to watch the space shuttle launch. And so we saw the fiery end of our childhood dreams — that the mysteries of space contained the best of our futures, those infinite possibilities finally within our reach — on a stranger’s TV. I don’t remember her name. We rented that house, and moved a couple of years later. There were layers to Johnny Taylor’s joke that I won’t reveal. What I want to say about it is I felt engaged by the joke in a way that would be impossible on Twitter, where tone is flattened and everything’s stripped of context and presented in an airless room where you can’t see anyone’s faces. I can’t quit Twitter and I’m not sure I want to. But seeing what a “successful” tweet gets me is always a good reminder to tweet like it just doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t.

North Star Energy here: