0.01 % of 8 Billion is 800,000.

I always find our perception of scale falters when we get in to these numbers. Trying to reconcile that number with the fullness of even one life, its like trying to hold 10,000 years in your mind.

800,000 people in a photo look like a macro image of a multi coloured carpet. Whole lives just individual strands of threaded fabric, a person just a pixel or two.

Yet social media makes some people think this is an attainable and appropriate level of reach. As though we should all expect to fill the worlds largest stadium 8 times over and have it follow us around. As though connecting with a fraction of that wouldn't be fulfilling.

I remember when i first hit 4 thousand followers. A number some wouldn't even register. I recall pausing for a moment and actually thinking about that number. It would fill one quarter of the 02 in London, the largest stadium i'd been to, and sell out every other venue I'd ever been in.

I say this with all honesty, it scared me for a moment.

I know I know, not all 4000 of those are "real people", but many are and for a moment they all were. Every word, every image, every comment visible, shared on a screen in front of 4000 people, shouted in to a microphone before a packed Brixton Academy. The thought of taking that stage in real life would empty my stomach, yet here it was, in my pocket, every moment of everyday. I even wrote a verse to try and process it.

Imagine when you whispered

A shout came out that carried

A chinook wind, blasting fissures

Of sound, to 4000 sets of eyes and ears

Wouldn’t you be silenced, by misspoken fear?

Perhaps I lack the confidence, the ego or arrogance to face such a volume. But i do not think it that alone, I am happy for my work to stand on that same stage, to be eroded and raised up by a thousand observations and comments. But to put myself there, to say yes, my flawed foolish thoughts of self are worthy of this attention, of this influence.

To say I should pursue that influence, to stand before 800,000 and think I am worthy of that scale, that is something I do not think we can do without also accepting the risk that it irrevocably changes us. It distorts our perception of life, reduces it out of the need to contain all that we stand before. In that reduction much is lost that is not directed at you, and so you become the centre of every world you see, reducing all others to their perception of you.

Our sense of sale has been decimated by the digital. When 800,000 can be just a number on a screen, made up of less pixels than people it represents, is it any wonder some are so irresponsible with their influence? OR some feel so unworthy through their lack of supposed following.