Giving Each Other ‘The Clap’
Terijo , I love your high school auditorium analogy. It is perfect. I went to a high school with almost 4,000 students (a long, long time ago). We had to have our student body meetings in the football stadium because our auditorium wasn’t big enough. At the beginning of each session the principal would come to the podium and remind everyone that outright applause was not allowed. To every speaker we could only respond with the official school clap. (This was always followed by laughter.)
The official school clap was just one solitary clap. Almost four thousand students applauding with extended clapping was just far too intense and, worse, it extended the length of the school meetings far beyond what anyone — faculty or student body — wanted.
Of course, eventually someone (usually a daring student) would come to the microphone and say something that everyone really, really liked and the whole stadium broke out in extended clapping — much to the disdainful chagrin of the principal.
Here at Medium our principal is Ev Williams . He has made the decision to move from a one-clap system (or one-heart system) to one that allows for a slightly more expressive applause system.
To be honest, I really don’t mind so much. I like clapping when I read something that really turned me on. To be even more honest, I really don’t care. The change is merely cosmetic.
No matter how young or old we are, when we are on Medium we are still in a high school auditorium. Our principal introduced a tiny, cosmetic change in hopes of appeasing the growing dissent among the student body but what he failed to do is change the very nature of the auditorium and the meeting being held. We are still in a high school auditorium and we are still being treated like high school students. Our expressions are still being judged by the faculty by quantity rather than quality, and that form of judgment is still being instilled in us just as it was in high school. Just like in high school, popularity is the one and only thing that matters. Just as in high school, the faculty is totally focused on controlling a very large ‘student’ body. The principal of Medium has chosen to adopt the paradigm of high school psychology to run his very large platform.
And if a tiny cosmetic change like clapping will divert the student body’s attention from the larger problems of the prevailing paradigm then the principal can relax and breathe easier for at least a little while — until those larger problems resurface.
I never thought I would say this but I want everyone to give me The Clap. Give it to me. Give it to me harder and harder. I want your Clap! Give it to me.
But when the applause is over let’s start dealing with the real issues; the serious ones. Let’s start busting paradigms instead of reliving and reinforcing old ones that we can’t seem to let go of.
And this won’t happen by getting a new principal. It is up to the student body to force these changes into being. We can only hope that he listens. From his very, very intense silence we can only surmise that all we’re doing is whistling in the wind.
