Who’s reading your blog?

People don’t read blogs. At least that’s the studied conclusion my 47-yr old brain’s reached. Blogs written by slightly, er, kinky sorts, who insist on describing how they had sex with a new partner every night just so that they might tell all the next morning and hopefully make a fortune by binding it all in a hard case if they find a gullible publisher, don’t qualify. Nor do the fancy ones created and maintained by companies and their agencies, in an assiduous attempt to ‘get to those members of their target audience who don’t watch boring TV or have never learnt to read papers’ (most of which, I’m told, have been awfully expensive failures anyway).

I refer instead, to blogs written by ‘normal’ people. So, why aren’t they read? For one, who has the time to peek into other peoples’ lives today? And frankly, who’d want to scour the Net to read through other peoples’ diaries before embarking on something of importance? After all, most people enter the virtual world with an objective: to search for information, book tickets, watch pornography et al (voyeuristic weaknesses having been dealt with above, already).

You might say this is the view of an atypical Internet user (most surveys suggest a bigger infatuation with the medium among the teens and the young). But this fact is corroborated by my 21-yr old son, who’s an avid blogger himself, and I hate to admit, the one who initiated me into this business. Fact is, he, who blogs consistently, does not get any comments on his posts either. That this makes him tear his otherwise substantial hair, or gives rise to unimagined inadequacies about his worth in the world is another matter: point is, no comments, so no reads!

Alright, big deal, I tell myself: you don’t write diaries and then throw them into cars at busy crossings like the evangelists, do you? Isn’t it a means of self-expression, a sort of catharsis, instead? This, I must admit, made eminent sense to my left-brain-by-training temperament, and I was happy to be an anonymous speck in the Existentialist Virtual World. Until last night, when someone, in the course of polite conversation, broke the bombshell of a different, till-now unimaginable possibility altogether.

There are, it seems, eavesdroppers on the Net. What else would you call people who read your blog and then, don’t leave any comments! It’s like they want to know the colour of underwear you’re wearing, but won’t acknowledge that they were peeping through the keyhole. I mean, you pay to see a movie, to read a bestseller, even to access important material from the Net. Hell, you even drop a coin into the violinist’s hat as you come out of the Underground! So, why not acknowledge the fact that you read someone’s writing by noting it was ho-hum, or simply, crap? Not just good manners, but also yeoman service to speck of dust in Existential Virtual World. Who know’s he just might stop squatting and free up some precious space?

Sigh. It’s difficult, but I can learn to live with this, I reckon. However nothing, repeat nothing, prepared me for another sort of character that’s apparently on the loose in blogosphere. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the tribe of journalists. Editors, Subs, Writers, Proof Readers, even. Innocuous, often bespectacled, respectable people otherwise, the kind you’d be nice to generally and hardly want to pick an issue with (who wants bad press?). That they routinely roamed the dark alleys of the Internet to pick up information quickly to meet deadlines or took recourse to when they were plain lazy to gather in first person, I knew for a long time. But, that they actually pick up and go through blogs randomly to suit their nefarious designs: that is to say, not only read, but analyse, dissect and then pilfer, pillage loot and plunder as they wish, is something I never imagined. And here I was, being told, quite incidentally, how ‘everyone’ in a particular magazine’s editorial office had been going through my blog that morning, (for what public good I cannot imagine), and how they immensely enjoyed themselves, and so on, and so forth. Conveniently, however, forgetting to mention whether anyone had bothered to ‘comment’ or otherwise leave trace of such visit!

Is this fair, I ask? No one said bloggers are TRP-crazy nerds who exalt in the ticking of visitor-number counters (ever seen one on a blog?), but if freedom of speech is a fundamental right to be upheld, then musn’t voyeurism, eavesdropping, or plagiarism be upheld as crime?

Think, you journalists, you purveyors of civilization, makers of culture, and harbingers of truth! And yes, DON’T bother to leave a comment.

P.S. This might be my last post on this blog, for I’m sure my wife, who’s an editor of a reputable magazine, is bound to go through it sooner or later. That will leave only one of two options: either I go ‘underground’ and choose a fresh squatting place and continue with my incantations, or I pack my bags (as I’ll probably be asked to do so) and head for a white water rafting trip down the Zanskar.