Strange vortices of power
This week’s Culture Morsel reflects on influence. Millie Bobby Brown, the talented 14 year old British actress, star of Netflix’s Stranger Things, has just been named on Time Magazine’s 2018 100 most influential people list. Aaron Paul, on Time’s website tells us: “She may have been 12 in years, but her spirit and mind were timeless. A wise woman was speaking from her cherubic face. It was like speaking to a future mentor with a perspective and groundedness that I could only have dreamed of…” Anyone with a natural scepticism about this kind of talk will feel their BS antennae twitching.
But fair play to her… at a recent award ceremony, she wore the names of the Parkland victims embroidered onto her shirt and spoke out in favour of the March for Our Lives movement. Her cohort are tomorrow’s US voters and if she is articulating the genuine fears and anxieties of young people who aren’t quite feeling the second amendment, she could, in the long run, be very influential indeed..
Strangely, a Time correspondent, justifying her inclusion last week, placed inordinate emphasis on her social media following numbers. This is interesting, because those figures are not all that high. She’s not in the top 100 on Instagram, and nowhere near even the top 500 on Twitter. If you count influence in terms of Twitter following, then Duwayne Johnson, the Rock is 6 times-, Paulo Coelho 8 times- and Mesut Özil fully 10 times more influential than her. Mesut Özil!!!??? That Gooner is only occasionally influential even on the pitch! All this to say that sheer numbers of Twitter or Instagram followers might not be the best measure of influence.
So do those numbers give any reliable indication of cultural influence at all? A look up and down the lists gives some cause for reflection… It might be that real cultural influence crops up in less obvious ways.
Eyecatching in particular is no.100 on the top Twitter accounts by followers list. It’s one Dr_alqarnee, with 55,000 Tweets to his name and a following of 19.2 million. This smiley Tweeter (Aidh bin Abdullah al Qarni) is a moderate Salafist Saudi cleric whose 2012 book La Tahzan(Don’t be sad), has to date sold millions of copies all across the Arab and Asian Muslim world. For the most part, it’s not radical or progressive stuff; much of the thrust is rather down to earth… try to keep a smile on your face, try not to worry too much about the future, and be happy with what you’ve got. But its upbeat, human tone seems to have struck a deep chord.
“Laughing moderately can act as a cure or as a therapy for despression and sadness. It has a strong influence on keeping the soul light and the heart clear. […] the noblest of people, Mohammed (bpuh) would laugh, sometimes until his molars became visible.”
Another Saudi cleric with a rather less smiley vibe is Mohamad Alarefe, sandwiched at no. 86 between Elon Musk and Avril Lavigne, with 22m followers. His pronouncements have not had quite the same levity and he’s a particular fan of the ‘Snap fatwa.’ He is reckoned to have outsize influence in recruitment for ISIS.
The lesson here is that influence comes in all shapes and sizes, on all kinds of community, with all kinds of implications, immediate and longer term, local, regional and global. It doesn’t help to boil it down to number of tweets or followers. Perhaps the Time 100 list are onto something, with their fuzzy qualitative judgements about the nature of influence. As Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s, “…among the peoples of the world strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly.”
Not all of these strange new vortices will necessarily show up in the Twitter and Instagram top 100 charts, but some of them might.