Perhaps someone has been reading, but I really have no idea. I haven't gotten any comments and no one has mentioned reading it to me. I'm in this whole Iron Blogger thing, and maybe that causes people to read the other posts in it, but there are, what, 40 of us? And most of the rest of the blogs are about version control and other things that make me feel like they probably are not super interested in my blog.
I don't have an audience I'm writing for, and that's fascinating. I haven't kept a personal diary in years, and all other writing has been for some audience, whether it's a personal email, a paper for a professor, a zephyr(*) for unknown numbers of MIT people, tweets for potentially the entire world... and that always strongly shapes what I say. With this blog, my only real goal is to write a bit more seriously and formally than I do in other fora, and to be accessible to a wider audience. I suppose that means I do have an audience I am writing for, but it is defined by what it is not, instead of what it is. My audience did not go to MIT, and does not have a degree in Comparative Media Studies. My audience is not a fangirl, but is generally aware that American media exists. My audience does not play LARPs or go to Burning Man. My audience is not sexually or socially deviant. My audience does not live in Boston. My audience basically has nothing in common with me, I suppose. I want to be able to write for people who little to nothing in common with. I would like to able to take all the things that are important to me and explain them clearly and compelling to people who are unaware and uninterested. I'd really love to have a book published someday, and this blog aspires to be practice for that, though I haven't really lived up to that potential yet. "Maybe Next Week". Is that a motto of Iron Blogger? It should be.
* MIT's internal IM/IRC-like chat system. It has the strange evolved property that people constantly have group conversations where they have no idea who might be listening it, and any one of thousands of people affiliated with MIT could be.
1 comment:
Hahaha. That title's a good way to get people's attention. :)
I've noticed what you mentioned -- that most of the Iron Blogger blogs are about version control and debugging and stuff. I...sort of wish the blogs were sorted into "course 6" and "other." Each week, I go down the list of blogs and at least skim the posts that don't have to do with computer programming, but basically skip the rest.
Nelson's been talking about the difficulties of arranging a 40-person get-together. Maybe we could arrange ourselves into 2 or 3 sub-groups based on topic matter? I don't know.
And yeah, I have no idea how many people actually look at my blog either.
Post a Comment