Influencers

This issue's story "Relatable Influence" by Bradley Bazzle calls to mind the change in the word "influencer" over the last few years from referring to someone who has a significant impact or serves as an inspiration in one's life—an important character such as a grandparent, teacher, writer, or entertainer—to the current "influencer" who stimulates you to buy something: a marketing celebrity or personality on the Internet. Bazzle's story is about a mom blogger who worries that her increase in followers is leveling off and hires a famous photographer to promote her image. He proves to be a disruptive force with methods the narrator can't fathom. "Relatable Influence" is an arch and slyly satirical story about social media influence, and it has much to do with the difference between the old-fashioned meaning of that term and the current meaning, as well as with people's difficulty accepting change.

The story stirred a conversation among our editors about our own influencers at different life phases and how, over time, even what seem like vital ones may become less so as personal issues evolve. Some of our own influences were really important, and some simply added to our lives' enjoyments—and indeed, even the important ones changed over time. Such musing may cause a flash of melancholy, fond or otherwise, but the larger fact of universal impermanence makes it hardly a surprise that influences evolve or wane. Over historical time, broad human knowledge and history change at an amazing pace, just as over geological time, rivers find different routes, mountains wear down or spring up, and so forth.

I recently read an article that provides a notable example of the progress of knowledge of what might be called the largest subject—the shape and size of the universe. The article made the point that in cosmology, the models keep evolving. One of the current models describes about 2 trillion galaxies or 2000 billion galaxies by the American math system, spread over about 13 billion years of time (depending on how you figure it; fifty-some more billion by another method), arranged in weird, spiderweb-like clusters. Some places show a relative density of galaxies, while others appear to be vast regions of nothingness, or at least include nothing detectable. Quite a change from the heliocentric Copernican model or even the early Big Bang models of less than a century ago. Yet such evolving representations occur not just in physics and biology and geographical science but in every area of thought, the humanities as well.

Like the sciences, the humanities evolve in almost parabolic curves as we learn more and take note of different elements of a full subject. I am reading These Truths, Jill Lepore's new single-volume history of the United States. She admits at the start that it's a nearly impossible task to survey the history of the nation in one volume—offering, for example, only a brief discussion of the War of 1812—but she offers a wonderful, compressed look at how much our history has evolved over the last twenty years. Lepore is a realist about the settlement of the Americas and, without being hamstrung by political correctness, describes fairly directly the succession of events that went into the organizing of this great nation. American and US historians now have at their call far more knowledge of such subjects as population movements, economic and religious motives for settlement, slavery, Native American relations, and the conflicts among the almost mind-numbing variety of populations and cultures at play in the Americas.

Because the Americas offered so much space compared to the livable space in Europe—five times more—in 1492 they were both more widely settled and more populous, with about 75 million people compared to Europe's 60 million. Europeans, despite dying in droves from the rigors of crossing the Atlantic and early settlement, particularly in the Caribbean, carried with them diseases that killed tens of millions of Native Americans. Between 1500 and 1800, two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas, bringing with them 12 million slaves. The diseases that resulted...