Influencers!

Thanks to the proliferation of social media, a new species of animal has attained notoriety of late: they are called 'influencers'. Apparently anybody can become one: you don't need any kind of serious knowledge, intelligence, social ideal or anything of the slightest importance to say, you don't even need to be an adult (think Malala Yousufzai, or Greta Thunberg) - all you need is dogged perseverance, carrying on spewing nonsense about nonsense ('how to paint your nails', 'how to fight off body shaming', 'which new phone to buy', 'what to do if your boyfriend cheats on you'...) until the number of visits and 'likes' on your Instagram or Youtube channel climbs into six or seven figures.

It bemuses me to think that once upon a time the label of 'influencer' could have been tagged only to earth-shaking titans like Jesus, or Chenghiz Khan, or Isaac Newton or Shakespeare.

The flip side: these days 'influencers' become famous then vanish into obscurity all within the span of one year or less, the vast majority of them. When you have too many influencers, nobody is significantly influenced by anything for any length of time!