Cav's Place

I found myself wondering how many fans can someone have before becoming unable to have meaningful interaction with them. Started by thinking about musicians, remembering a bit of the interview the members of Nightwish gave before one of their concerts here, where they were saying that, even though it’s not a nice thing to do, they have to pretty much ignore all e-mails they receive, as otherwise they’d be spending ten hours per day reading and replying to them and wouldn’t get anything else done. (This was before Nightmail.) But it applies to anyone else just as well, be it actors, athletes, writers, painters, activists and so on.
I’m not talking about the public figures who simply choose not to have such a meaningful interaction with their fans. If they do what they do for personal reasons, or simply for the results, and don’t even claim that they work for the enjoyment or request the support of their fans, I think they have every right to ask to be left alone. I’m also not talking about using staff members to sort through messages and only pass on a select few or even reply to some of them themselves. That’s no longer direct interaction with the public figures themselves and the existence of these intermediaries makes even the answers supposedly given to the fans be questionable. No, I’m talking simply about the direct interaction between the public figure and their public, such as meetings, replying to messages, getting involved in discussions on official forums and participating in events organized by fan clubs.

Meaningful interaction usually requires direct contact with individual fans, not simply throwing some greetings or platitudes towards a group, so it takes up a lot of time. Due to there being many more things you can do in person, it may take less time to meaningfully interact with a fan in such a situation and you could sometimes also achieve similar results with small groups instead of just individuals, but getting into such a position requires much more effort, both on your part and on part of your fans, plenty of whom won’t be able to reach you at all if you require meeting in person in order to interact. So that leaves the Internet, and specifically replying to messages, as the generic method of meaningful interaction with the largest potential number of fans.
So we need to change the question and ask about messages. How many messages could such a public figure read and reply to before this would take a noticeable toll on their personal and, more importantly in this particular situation, professional life? Not that answering even this question would be easy. The amount of time available varies greatly depending on what exactly it is you do, different messages require different amounts of time and effort to read and reply to, but there are also messages that require no reply, though some of them, such as the generic praises and critiques, do require at least browsing through in order to get a general idea regarding the way in which people perceive your work, which is useful information even if your motivations don’t include fame or public approval.
Still, the more clearly defined the question, the more likely it is to get a suitable answer. And, in fact, asking about this particular method of interaction can get an answer that’s less influenced by other factors, as reading and replying to messages doesn’t exactly require scheduling or setting aside a significant amount of time, as would be the case for actual meetings or even on-line conferences, because it can be split and squeezed into any moment of the day or night. Actually, at times it would even be relaxing, inspiring or otherwise beneficial for the public figure in question to take a break from their work and go through some messages, so this certainly seems to be the best method to meaningfully interact with the largest number of fans in the vast majority of cases. But even this has a limit, and that limit is the answer to the question.

I couldn’t tell you what that answer is, however. I only know that there very obviously is such a limit, so I have to move on to the even greater question: What should such a public figure do once they end up having too many fans to be able to meaningfully interact with them? Of course at that point it becomes quite mandatory to get some help, have some staff members go through the messages, release press statements, answer frequently asked questions and so on, but that actually only widens the gap between the public figure and their public even further, as the chance of direct contact is greatly reduced. So what should they do in order to make up for this, assuming they care, or at least pretend to care, about their public? How should their demeanor and their work change once they cross that line?
Trying to answer this question normally leads to a lot of speculation, with each person saying what they’d like their favorites to do, but I think most would agree that such public figures should do the opposite of what they usually do when it comes to details about themselves and their personal lives, making a fair bit of information public, becoming open books, and therefore allowing their public to feel as if there is a connection even when meaningful direct interaction is no longer possible. This could also have the added benefit of getting some of the paparazzi off their backs, as there’d be little point in trying to find out information that would be made public anyway, not to mention that the one who first makes information public gets to present it their way, thus also preventing the scandals generated by tabloids spinning tales. Of course, some public figures thrive on just such scandals, but I’m not talking about them here…
The second thing I believe such public figures should do is focus more on their work and perhaps, if we’re talking about creative work, put more of themselves and of their lives into it, make it more personal. This latter point goes well with what I said in the previous paragraph, while the former should result in an improvement in the quality and/or an increase in the quantity of their work, therefore being sort of a compensation for the fans, a way to show they still care despite no longer being able to meaningfully interact in any direct way with enough of them.