Sowing the E-Seed

Today’s gospel is about sowing seed–a promising but ultimately inefficient activity, both in the field and on line. I was thinking about that a year ago . . .

I do not consider myself to be a particularly obsessive person (Jeanne might disagree), but my penchant for checking my blog statistics on at least an hourly basis belies my claim. In the middle of the summer when my schedule is less intense it is easier to explain why I frequently check my blog either on my phone or tablet, but I find time to do so regularly even when the semester is in full swing. I have even stepped out of someone presenting a philosophy paper at a conference on the pretense of visiting the men’s room on a particularly busy blog day to see how many more hits my new post has attracted since the paper began a half hour before.

It did not help when Jeanne bought me a couple of hours’ worth of conversation online with a blog consultant several weeks ago. My blog has been in existence for close to two years now and I am continually surprised pleasantly by how well it is doing, but Jeanne would like to see it go through the stratosphere. I suspect there is an ulterior motive behind her promotional hopes for my writing beyond the fact that she loves me—she wants this blog to be the vehicle for my writing becoming so popular and my turning into a speaker so highly and lucratively in demand that she can retire. During the first Skype-type hour with my very pleasant, very talented and frighteningly young blog consultant Matt, it was clear that he did not know what to make of me. I’m not selling anything on my blog, I’m not promoting anything other than ideas and stories—most of his clients are trying to become rich off their blog activities. It was clear that it would take some time for him to understand me when within the first ten minutes of our first conversation he suggested strongly that I should get rid of the penguins at the top of the entry page to my site. Unaware that messing with my penguins is like messing with my children, he backed off when I told him the penguins weren’t going anywhere (although he tentatively raised the issue again the other day at our most recent session).

On his advice my blog has been moved to a much more powerful platform. For the most part I have no real idea what that means except that it cost some money and forced me to learn a few new habits when preparing posts for publication (sort of the same as moving from Word 2010 to Word 2013; a general pain in the ass, but not impossible). The most tangible difference is that I now have access to approximately 1000 times more stats concerning where the people visiting my blog are coming from, how they got there, what they are reading, how long they are staying, what search engines are directing them to me most effectively, etc., etc., etc. Not a good thing for my stat-obsessive tendencies, but I’m doing okay so far. That’s probably because I’m finding some things out that I don’t like.

For instance, the “bounce rate” on my blog for the month since it was moved to its new platform is 72.04%. The bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).” Well that’s not good. Matt says “we should try to get that under 70%,” which also doesn’t sound very good. I think he blames it on the penguins. My blog has been visited by folks in 67 different countries in the past month (over 150 since the blog began), but the bounce rate brings those numbers into sobering perspective. I can just hear people in forty-five different languages saying “What the fuck is this??” as they zip away from my entrance page. They probably didn’t like the penguins.

Drilling down deeper (a cool, nerdy phrase Matt likes to use) into the location stats, I discover that in the US, not surprisingly, 39.06% of my visitors are from Rhode Island, with a close competition for a distant second between New York, Texas, and Massachusetts. Texas?? That doesn’t make sense. But the bounce rate from Texas visitors is 87.88% and the average duration of their visit is thirty seconds, so even Texans can figure out pretty quickly that my liberal, blue state, non-fundamentalist blog is somewhere they don’t want to be. It’s probably the penguins. I am also disturbed to find out that there are three states who have not sent someone to my blog in the last month: South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska. I’ll work on saying something nice about Mount Rushmore and corn in the coming weeks. By the way, I can drill down even deeper and find out what cities and towns visitors are coming from as well. I haven’t figured out how to find out my visitors’ mailing addresses yet, but if I do I’ll be writing you individually.

I could go on and on, but I shouldn’t—that would require my spending even more time looking at blog stats. But I wondered for several days whether all of the time and energy I put into my blog is worth it when almost three-quarters of the people who arrive on my entrance page and have the opportunity to read my latest bits of wit and wisdom don’t. Fortunately the Gospel readings for the past few Sundays have been from Matthew 13, the wonderful chapter in which Jesus shares many of his most memorable parables. Like this one:

Listen! A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!

It is difficult to imagine a more wasteful and non-economical activity. If this sower had Google Analytic statistics to gauge the success and effectiveness of his activity, I’ll bet his bounce rate (the sum of seeds that fell on the path, rocky ground, and among thorns) is at least as high as mine. But if, as Jesus’ interpretation later in the chapter suggests, the seed is the word of God, then this is just the typical divine strategy that I keep bumping into—“Let’s just throw a bunch of crap out there indiscriminately and see what happens!” God is no respecter of persons, statistics, focus groups, yield projections, bounce rates, or any other thing humans might devise as the best measures of effectiveness and efficiency. All you have to do is consider the extraordinary wastefulness of the way God chose to crank out endless varieties of living things, natural selection, to realize that Isaiah wasn’t kidding when he reports God as saying that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”

I’ll try to keep this in mind whenever my stats aren’t to my liking or Matt tries to get me to ditch my penguins. Every Monday and Friday when I throw new e-seed out there and Wednesdays when I throw out recycled e-seed, I am imitating a divine activity that makes no sense but somehow produces fruit in the most unexpected and unpredictable places. Excellent. And I’m not getting rid of the penguins.