Censorship as / and Social Good
While these individual data points may be of little value in themselves , together they demonstrate that the more connected turtles are to their contemporaries , the fewer turtles need to be exposed to a topic in order to give the impression that it is a popular point of conversation . Applying this observation to Twain and his audience suggests that Twain ’ s confidence in the popularity of his Autobiography could be attributed to the strength of the connections he sees between audience members . Twain himself was quite well connected to his contemporaries . His typical rate of letter production has been noted at between two and 10 letters a day ; and , Robert Hirst notes , “ anybody who wrote him tended to get a reply . He easily wrote 50,000 letters ” ( Griffith , 2001 ). The more connected Twain may have imagined his readers to be , the easier it becomes to arrive at the conclusion that his work is reaching a large audience .
Looking beyond Twain ’ s specific situation , my model can generally be said to show that high levels of interest in a topic of conversation are more easily imagined as audience members in an environment become more connected . Even a small audience can generate the impression that large numbers of agents are interested in a topic if agents in the model are sufficiently connected . This observation points to a reading of the Autobiography in which Twain ’ s enthusiasm for the text signals a belief in a vibrant , social , engaged society that stands in contrast to the bleak worldview more commonly associated with his later years . 2 It is also draws attention to how closely questions about the circulation of information are linked to assumptions about audience behavior in the nineteenth century , and in our own .
At the moment the United States is led by a President who claims an online audience of 100 million people while leading a nation estimated by the U . S . Census Bureau to have a population of nearly 325 million ( Barber , Sevastopulo , & Tett , 2017 ). 3 The President routinely characterizes his online presence as an alternative to and an escape from the media , stating on Twitter December 5 of 2016 “ if the press would cover me accurately & honorably , I would have far less reason to ‘ tweet .’ Sadly , I don ’ t know if that will ever happen !” ( Trump , 2016 ). Many experts estimate his audience is likely to be much smaller than 100 million . Journalist Jeff Nesbit summarizes some of their objections in a recent contribution to U . S . News and World Report before concluding “ Trump seems to genuinely believe that he is bypassing the media and speaking directly to large numbers of American voters through his Twitter account . But , by any reasonable measure , he is not . The irony is that his actual megaphone to a large audience may , in fact , be occurring when the news media he despises writes stories about his tweets ” ( Nesbit , 2017 ). Given the fact that the President describes his 100 million followers as an aggregate spread across Twitter , Facebook , and Instagram , I see no reason to disagree with Nesbit ’ s criticism . What interests me in this debate are the reasons that may be marshaled to support these two very different estimates of audience size . The model I have constructed to investigate the circulation of Mark Twain ’ s Autobiography suggests that a central point in this discussion and other discussions involving audience size and the circulation of information involves determining the model of audience behavior
2
See , for example , the biographical portrait provided by the Mark Twain House & Museum at https :// www . marktwainhouse . org / man / biography _ main . php
3
For a current estimate of the U . S . population see https :// www . census . gov / popclock /. 102