Influencers

Should we be more guarded about what we let into our minds?

From Etymonline

I knew a girl once, years ago, who wanted to be a writer, but who feared reading anything or anyone, lest someone else’s voice influence her own work. She felt she needed to keep her writerly voice pure and unsullied by others, to avoid becoming a wan copy of someone else.

I thought it was a strange idea back then, and I think it’s a strange idea now.

How can you go through life without being influenced—by other voices, other ideas, other…things? My mood is influenced all day long, every day, by sights and smells and sounds in the air and songs in my head. My ideas are influenced by other people’s ideas. My stories are influenced by other people’s stories. I can’t imagine living any other way.

How can you be a writer if you’re not an avid reader? How can you be a visual artist if you keep your eyes shut tight? How can you exist in the world and not be touched and changed by it? It seems like a hopeless battle right from the start. And not even a good one. Isn’t our job to take the world in—all of it—and react and respond to it in ways that are, we hope, meaningful and resonant to others?

Embracing Influence

“Influence” is not some kind of demonic possession. It’s not as if something you’re read or seen takes over your soul and replaces your voice and vision with its own. Being touched doesn’t mean being taken over. Even when a young painter is trying to copy a famous painting, stroke by stroke, it never ends up being a perfect copy. Something of you always seeps through, even when you’re trying to stop that from happening. It’s inevitable. Nothing that enters your body or mind exits you untouched. You process it and filter it, adding things and removing things and changing things. You put your mark on everything that passes through you.

Who have I been influenced by? So many people! Parents, friends, lovers, wives, children. Artists, poets, composers, novelists, playwrights, singers. Teachers, mentors, researchers, coaches. Historical figures who’ve taken brave stands and done important things. I am who I am because some aspect of each of those people touched me and inspired me and perhaps nudged a slight change in the direction I was traveling. I am happy each one of them has had in influence—an influx of some ethereal power into my life, as per the definition above. I’m grateful for it. I want more.

I want the little influences, like hearing just the right song at just the right time. I want the big influences, like reading a book that changes the way I see the world. I want the grand influences, like someone whose words or actions compel me to get out of my chair and do something different.

Maybe I don’t really want that last one. Maybe it scares me. Maybe I need it, anyway.

Resisting Influence

ON THE OTHER HAND…

(he said, in his eye-rollingly ambivalent, equivocating, textbook-Libra way)…

Maybe we let ourselves get influenced too easily these days. Maybe the apertures are too wide open and too much crap flows into our minds and brains. There are certainly more streams of…stuff out there, spigots all open to full, with no gatekeepers or editors or “adults” making decisions about whether a thing deserves to be spewed out to the general public, or whether the tap should even be open.

You can tell this is true just by the degradation of the word at the top of this post. We have a whole class of people in public life who we never had before, called Influencers. Back in the before times, we had people whose jobs were various but who, if they connected with the public, had some influence. Their influence was secondary to the work they did, or it came as a result of the work’s importance. Now we have people whose actual job title is “Influencer.” They’re not writers who influence, or scientists who influence, or makers-of-things who influence. They just…influence.

What is the job? The job is to like a thing and then tell you about it; The job is to tie whatever personal glamor and appeal they have to the object in question, in order to help sell it. They may genuinely like the thing and be sharing it out of excitement. They may also be accepting money to pretend to like a thing. It’s a syllogism of sales: you like me; I like it; therefore, you like it.

Is this really any different than pretty women being draped over cars or blenders in TV commercials in order to sell those things? It feels a little different to me, but maybe that’s just my age and un-hipness showing through (although I was un-hip long before I was old). Maybe wanting to grow up to be a model and growing up wanting to be an influencer are close cousins.

Either way, given the firehose of influence being trained upon us, it’s worth thinking about. And we know how un-think-y some our thinking can be.

We know we don’t make choices and decisions as rationally as we think we do. We take cognitive shortcuts all the time, using wealth or beauty or even a person’s height and weight as stand-ins for wisdom or kindness or strength. We make decisions about individuals based on broad generalizations. Those choices may be right just enough, just often enough, to reinforce the shortcuts and stereotypes in our brains, but they’re not right all the time, and playing the odds without reading the room can get us all in a lot of trouble.

Being influenced by a person you don’t know, without understanding why that person is advocating for the thing they’re hawking or whether they believe in in, themselves, can be dangerous. We have discussions all the time about whether we should support the art of people whose private lives have been awful, even if those awful things haven’t seeped into the art. Why shouldn’t we talk a little more critically about the people who have decided that their actual job is to change our minds?

It wouldn’t be the worst idea to take an influence sabbath every once in a while—to shut off the tap and let our minds have a little quiet space. To get used to hearing our own voices again, uninfluenced. Maybe that girl I knew, the one who wanted to keep her voice pure, knew more than I was willing to acknowledge.

It probably wouldn’t kill us to shut off the news, too, every once in a while. We might be surprised, when we open the floodgates again, at how abrasive and unpleasant the noise of relentless influence is.

While that streaming, ethereal power keeps pumping itself out through the Internet, I’m going to try to do a better job of taking a critical distance from it—to put at least a little bit of a brake between it and my brain. When they try to convince me, I should assume they’re wrong and make them have to prove it. When try to get me excited, I should assume they have an ulterior motive.

If they want influence to be their job, I should make them work a little bit harder to get it.