It seems like word social media networks are everywhere all of a sudden, in almost every new book and magazine being published. We’ve even had some here in Exacting Clam. The first one to rise to popularity was a service called Clamgram. Clamgram was launched with Issue 19, but it didn’t really take off until Issue 21—at least that’s when I remember words and phrases first starting to create profiles and post regularly. I couldn’t tell you which phrase started the trend, but my first interaction with the site was an email invitation to join from the story “John Keats was Wrong When He Said a Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever.” I went ahead and created a basic profile—my username (@metaclam) and a picture of me smiling dumbly—just so I could see the words’ posts. And I remember being surprised by how many phrases from the issue had already signed up—I saw posts from “lay hidden within astrocytes,” “The Time of the Evening Breeze,” “the machine that man invents,” “Zen Tips to Be Mentally Strong,” you name it. I hadn’t been logged in more than five minutes, in fact, when the phrase “iron in the blood”—who’d just posted photos of themselves smiling on the page during the previous day’s layout session—“clammed” me. I accepted.

I’ll admit, I soon became slightly addicted to Clamgram. I started checking it during typesets, breaks between meetings, slow moments on the page, whenever I could. I can’t even explain the draw of it, really—it’s not like I wasn’t reading these same words all day already. I was going through a difficult time in those days, though—my wife had left me and my father had died—and I think I was longing for something to remind me who I was, that I wasn’t alone in this life, that I had a community. So I liked tuning into Clamgram and seeing the review of The Last Supper and “The Eyes of the Poor” raising glasses at a nearby bar, or “cigars in a lobby”’s photo of a sunset. It didn’t even matter that I hardly knew Eyes—we’d been introduced once at a meeting, I think—and the other two selections not at all. I developed what I believe is called a paraverbal relationship with them. I didn’t need them to know me; I still felt like we were friends.

One day that spring, though, assistant editor of emotions Mixy Dervish called me while I was numbering and told me we had a problem. “Do you know about a website called ‘clam grams’?” she asked.

“Clamgram,” I said. “Sure—I know it.”

“Well Endorphins posted a photo on it, and now ‘AMERIKA’ is offended. Something having to do with breaking things, I guess?”

“AMERIKA broke something?”

“I really don’t know, Chris,” she said. “I was hoping you could look into it, try to smooth it over.”

I walked out to page 53 the next morning to speak with AMERIKA. Without so much as a hello, though, the story held up its phone to show me a recent post from “Endorphins Have Complicated Our Pastiche”—the photo showed Pastiche, “Cross-Reverence,” “To Myk,” and a few other Issue 21 selections wearing goggles and standing around a smashed television. Myk was holding a baseball bat and snarling at the camera. “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” I said.

“That’s called a smash room,” AMERIKA said. “You rent it out and you destroy things—TVs, cars, whatever. They all went there the other night.”

“Huh,” I said. “That sounds fun.”

“It does, I agree!” sang AMERIKA. “So how come no one invited me? I’m stressed! I’m working hard! I’d like to let off a little wordsteam.”

“No one invited me either,” I offered.

“You’re an editor,” the story said. “But how do you think it feels to see your peers having fun, and no one even thought to ask you.”

My heart dropped inside my chest.

“I mean is that the kind of culture we want in this issue?” the story asked. “Exclusivity? Cliques?”

I met with Pastiche in my office the next afternoon. I’d expected them to be contrite, but they were actually slightly standoffish. “This was a poems-only get together—a bonding exercise,” said the verse. “Is that not allowed all of a sudden?”

I organized a reconciliation for the two selections, but that was just the beginning of our troubles with Clamgram. Two weeks later, a shouting match between “hot, spiky dust” and “behest of gravity” broke out after dust posted a picture of three stacked tildes with the caption “FRAZZLED by my coworkers.” Despite dust’s protests that it was just a meme, gravity thought sure the post was subclamming them. In fact, I heard gravity quit Clamgram shortly thereafter in favor of one of the issue’s other burgeoning word social media sites.

As if that wasn’t enough, Cal Voss called an emergency editors’ meeting later that month after the phrase “exquisitely hypersensitive and attuned to the physical and spiritual tinctures” showed up one morning in an ornate new font. When Cal asked the phrase about it, they said the font came from one of their sponsors.

“What do you mean, sponsors?” asked editor Sigh Becker during the meeting.

“Apparently,” Cal said, leaning back in his chair, “exquisitely hypersensitive is an influencer.”

We decided then and there that enough was enough—that we were going to have to implement some guidelines and rules of good practice. The editors formed a subcommittee charged with drawing up a social media contract, which we’d planned to ask every online phrase in the issue to sign. But we soon found that task more complicated than we’d anticipated. Yes, we wanted the words to avoid hurt feelings and subclam slights. But words were entitled to their freedoms, no? Shouldn’t they be able to post what they wanted, so long as they dealt with the ramifications?

Even as we debated those questions, Clamgram began losing popularity. Some phrases moved over to OpenClam, others to Gurgle or one of the other new sites. By the end of April, hardly anyone talked about Clamgram anymore.

I found all of this—the linguistic strife, the editorial arguments, the dispersal of a community I’d come to rely on—really disheartening. So I resigned from the subcommittee and decided not to sign up for any of the new social media sites. Instead I stayed on Clamgram, even as the site grew lonelier and quieter. Eventually, full days passed with no activity there at all. Even so, I’d still clam every once in a while—“#stillhere,” I’d write, or “#ClamGram4Eva!”—but hardly anyone ever responded. In my last clam, I wrote, “Is anyone there?” But I already knew the answer.