ours is the tragedy of the silent stars

It makes sense to me now, in a way it never did before—the idea of performers failing to adapt to a new medium, as they used to say of the stars of the silent movies. I think I must always previously have parsed this as a sort of euphemism—a polite, proto-PR way of saying that they’d just become unpopular somehow, or that perhaps they’d started hitting the sauce (or the chemicals) too hard. But having lived through a fairly dizzying succession of new media over the last two decades, I now get it quite literally. I cam up as a blogger when that was the cool new thing, and I was pretty OK at it; a long way from anything you’d ever describe as stardom, certainly, but enough to get me out of totally unemployable obscurity. When the socnets came, I got on board early with Twitter (when you still updated by SMS!) and was, again, modestly adept at it. But then came the Instagrams and the YouTubes and the Vines and the Snapchats and the TikToks, and suddenly the blogosphere—a label whose…