My imagined readers....Perhaps it is sometimes useful to sit down and think about who you are actually writing for - why have I actually felt the need to move the really long posts somewhere else?? Who are the imagined readers of my blogg? Well, some of them are definitely just not imagined, but very real: myself (this blogg was initially mostly thought of as a personal notebook), colleagues like Jill, Torill, Hilde, Gonzalo, Anja, Susana, Jesper etc - people who are familiar with my subjects and do not mind long posts or obscure thoughts (or so I imagine). Then there are those I know are there - people who might have mailed me commenting on the blogg and whose URLs I recognise regularly in my URL-statpage. They are not all necessarily readers familiar with my subject and I do not want to neither encourage or disencourage them with my writing - though I do like to write in a way which could make my subjects seem of relevance to others outside the field. Then there are the "official" readers, those who come to this page via the ITU and DIAC staff homepage. For the sake of those I want the page to both look professional and provide some "professional" information - and I think it is also mainly because of these imagined readers that I find myself more and more reluctant to post more personal information here: I do no necessarily want colleagues or students of mine to know what is going on in my private life. On the other hand, I want them - and especially students (who could themselves go on to become ph.d.students) to know what the life of a ph.d.student is like - I want to share reflections, informations, silly moods and depressed moods with them to "demonstrate" that the life of a ph.d.student is definitely versatile, not always fun, but mostly rewarding...And being a ph.d.student, sometimes rather busy and not with much time to see friends has also made some of them read the blogg: "then at least we have an idea of what is going on in your life" as one of them said. Another friend commented that she would like to see me "contextualise" things more - which I have occasionally tried to do. But seing that the crowd of my imagined (and real) readers are growing, I find that the only way to avoid absolute schizofrenia and the trap of trying to cater for everybody's needs is to try and posit myself as the most ideal reader of this blogg. What would I myself like to read - in which way - and what would I need to "contextualise" in relation to a URL or thought for it to be useful for myself a year down the line?? But also contemplating now more than ever - knowing that a new term is starting - during which a lot of students will be coming this way - to move the blogg somewhere else on this site, not as index.page and that way keep a little distance, maintain some privacy (as far as that is possible in a public media)...I'll keep you posted;).

Well, perhaps this is what is most interesting by blogging: this experience of having not just one implied reader, but multiple readers whose actual existence I can track by looking at my webstats or the referrals to my writings in other blogs, and how this affects the way I think about writing. And how in the end, I find myself having to return to the notion of an implied reader (myself) to be able to write....Hmmh.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:09