6/7/24
"My Reader"
I’ve been writing web-based content as a personal project for a couple decades now. When I first started, I hit upon a popular topic — the Democratic contest for the Presidential nomination — and gathered a shockingly large audience fairly quickly. You don’t have to take my word for it either, spend some time on the Internet archive in 2003 and 2004 with deanblog.com and danconley.com and you’ll see that I had a robust comments section daily — with lots of track back links with major publications. Some of my most frequent visitors and commentators are now elected officials.
But over the years, my writing as become increasingly esoteric, and my audience smaller every step of the way. My original Montaigne project probably drew about 2,000 total visitors across its lifespan — which is actually quite good for the subject matter. But even that audience wasn’t quite small enough for me. I dove into increasingly less popular subject material and frequently destroyed my archives along the way. Reader loyalty has never been rewarded.
As best I can tell, the current iteration of my project has one reader. Well, that isn’t entirely true, there are stray readers who come across the blog via search engines or old links, but they rarely stay or return. It’s also difficult to track web traffic these days, especially with VPNs and private relay technology built into iOS devices.
There is, however, one reader who makes his- or herself known to me on a regular basis. This reader is technologically savvy. The reader saves stories to the Internet Archive from time to time so pieces can be accessed without leaving tracks behind. But often the reader WANTS to leave tracks behind and will use SEO software to leave breadcrumbs about particular stories without having to read them that day.
So what do I make of this? Well, that varies from day to day. When I feel confident in who this person is and the likely benign nature of the breadcrumbs, it makes me feel seen and appreciated. Having someone care enough about me, my thoughts and feelings to do this is intoxicating. I often will decide what to write and how to write it based on the assumption that this particular person is reading.
But some days I’m not so sure that my reader is who I assume she is. On these days, I feel a bit frightened … if she isn’t the one doing it, then who else could be doing it and why? And if these breadcrumbs aren’t from her, they are from someone trying very hard to point at her … which is quite terrifying, actually. Are all of my devices hacked and someone is engaging in some massive mindfucking operation on me?
The other aspect to consider is that the person who I assume is my reader is someone I interact with regularly in my life, and to be able to deal with her as much as I do, I have to compartmentalize my thoughts and feelings about her. In other words, I assume for the sake of our existing relationship that she has nothing to do with anything happening on my website. Our real life interactions aren’t affected by what else might be going. Which is interesting, because I have deep respect and affection for her anyway even without the readership aspect thrown in.
I don’t know if I could actually handle finding out definitively that this woman is my reader.