The Blogger's Audience Is Always A Fiction
For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both. A surface inscribed with information can neutralize time by preserving the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse.
… The person to whom the writer addresses himself normally is not present at all. Moreover, with certain special exceptions such as those just suggested, he must not be present. I am writing a book which will be read by thousands, or, I modestly hope, by tens of thousands. So please, get out of the room. I want to be alone. Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawal.
How does the writer give body to the audience for whom he writes? It would be fatuous to think that the writer addressing a so-called general audience tries to imagine his readers individually…
Walter Ong, The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction
The death of the author is the birth of the reader. The writer’s audience is always a fiction. First there is the mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. When I started blogging, I assumed I would be writing to a void of sorts, a string of anonymous IP addresses that would float through my small space. I would be faceless and they would be faceless and the words would just be.
When I write for school or for publication, I construct a faceless, mass audience. They are Academics, or Newspaper Readers, or Expository Folks. They want thoughts or news or feelings. When writing for a market, the audience is already formed. Blogging audiences seem to work the other way around: you write in your own strange, crooked way, and then people drift in. The audience forms around you. The audience is organic - it’s like mushroom circles springing up in the night. (Voluntary mushrooms – I love the fact that people choose to come here, instead of having my words foisted upon them.)
My blogging audience is an utter mass fiction, but some have become individual fictions. I find myself imagining a specific audience, one that has begun to individuate, and I create faces and details for them. The details are utter story, and usually inaccurate as well. (I was astounded to find that a blogging acquaintance who I had assumed to be rather clean-cut was instead long-haired and bearded. But I should know better than to try to pigeonhole academics and inky wretches.)
It seems that we have an inherent need to create identity, both for ourselves and others. I’m surprised at how much of myself I’m comfortable showing here. I feel naked all the time, but I really don’t reveal all that much. There’s my name, and bits of my academic personality. I can’t imagine ever posting a photo of myself like AKMA and Anne do. I like the withdrawal that’s available in some ways here – what you know is (more or less) what I consciously decide to tell you. In real life, it’s inevitable that people will know what shape or color I am or how I wear my hair or if I’m butch, femme or ambiguous. Here you just have to wonder, and construct your own Krista.
If I so appreciate my own relative anonymity and facelessness, why can’t I let other bloggers remain faceless as well? My mind, unbidden, begins to cobble things together. It wants to make their voices flesh, regardless of the fact that I’ll almost certainly never meet them in real life. I suppose it’s just an inevitable human cognitive function, wanting to find something different about someone/something we like so we can differentiate it from the rest of the world and thus return to it. Endearing, but also a bit creepy. After all, we have addresses – there’s no practical need for identity here. Maybe it’s our inborn socialness, and the fact that faces go with people. Since these are in fact real people, disembodied, that we meet in a virtual space, we can’t help but construct physical identities for them. The brain just doesn’t know what else to do.
Regardless, I like knowing that my acquaintance has a beard. That bit of knowledge changed him from an entity into a person for me. And (most) people are infinitely better than code.
Comments
I find that it helps if I imagine my audience naked.
Posted by: Jeff | February 22, 2003 3:12 PM
One of the first things a baby learns to differentiate is faces. I wonder, is this need/ability already wired into us even before we come into the world? And, if it is, can we ever ablate this apparently innate need to create faces in our audience?
Posted by: minnie | February 22, 2003 3:37 PM
I agree. Unfortunately for me, when the fiction nears reality, my part in the relationship with the "organism" develops responsibility and a consciousness in writing that's more of a bane than a blessing.
Posted by: Ailina | February 23, 2003 12:51 AM