A key problem with social media, from this perspective, isn’t just its online-ness but its scale. As Chris Hayes puts it in a recent essay for The New Yorker, the contemporary internet universalizes “the psychological experience of fame” and takes “all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work” seeking more of it. But that happens in a much more profound way on a network like Instagram, with all its teeming millions of users, than it would in a message board or chat room for some specific niche identity or interest.
Granted, it’s a common enough phrase, but you never know…
According to [Google ngrams], going back to 1900, looks like Ed’s use of teeming millions sent the use of the term off a cliff. Not many chances of shout-outs there.
“Teeming Millions” goes back in literature at least as far back as the 19th century, with the publication of
The Teeming Millions of the East: Being a Popular Account of the Inhabitants of Asia : the History of Existing and Extinct Nations, Their Ethnology, Manners, and Customs
Hayes Brown, MSNBC contributor, was a Doper back in the early 2000s. Refused to tell me his screen name, lol.
I link to my SDMB stuff all the time on Twitter and will get the occasional ‘oh, is the sdmb still around?’ or ‘I used to visit there!’ There have been a couple of other ‘blue check marks’* on Twitter who have also been Dopers, but the one I definitely remember is Hayes.
Anyone else remembers that for a while people thought “asshat” originated here and would start threads like this when they saw it elsewhere? I think it was “asshat”, but it might have been something else.
This thread seems especially odd to me, given that the article is quite specifically clear about what online platform they’re referring to with “teeming millions”: “…Instagram, with all its teeming millions of users”. I hardly think that Douthat was referring just to those members of Instagram who happen to be Dopers.
My “Alternate Ending to Big” thread has been cited elsewhere, but I forget where now. I have one of the older discussions findable on that particular Mandela Effect.