Dead Comments Society
The commenting system I use has been down for a week or so now, and I fear it might never get back up. This week, all my energy is focused on writing the last pages of the screenplay I’m working on, so I have very little time to look into another commenting solution, or to consider a radical move to a different publishing system.
In the meantime, you are all very silent and that’s a weird thing. A few sites I read have been talking about blogs being like (or unlike) a conversation, and part of me feels like I’m sitting in front of someone interesting, talking their ears off while pressing my hand hard against their mouth.
There are now few bloggers who make the choice not to enable comments on their Web site. Bob is one of them. So is Karl. How does he feel about this? (I should have asked him at the YULBlog gathering last night but we were too busy having a non meta-blog conversation.) Do people send him more personal e-mails because they can’t talk to him directly and publicly on his blog? And what would Navire.net be like if people couldn’t react to the posts? Damn! They can’t even reply here because of those damn dead comments!
I have a friend who used to send me photocopies of the pages of his diary, in order to keep me up to date with his life. It wasn’t highly personal stuff but still, I thought it was a bit strange and I asked him about it. He said that he couldn’t stand to write for himself only and that he needed to know he was read. I thought it was odd because for me it was the opposite: I couldn’t write in my diary unless I knew that absolutely nobody was going to read it. I kept thinking about the time after my death, when my relatives would go through my stuff, find the diaries and start reading them. I thought maybe I should destroy the notebooks. I still haven’t done it. Can’t get myself to.
But blogging is different for me. Some people think that my blog is a diary. I disagree. Even though I talk about my life, to me this sounds very different from any diary I would keep, not only because there are things you will never hear about on this site, but because of the feedback, of the ongoing contact with the people who read me, and my awareness of these readers as I write.
I look at my statistics and I know you are there (and there’s a lot of you these days, since every time Le Capitaine links to me, my stats go way up) but still, you remain silent and it feels like you are gone. I don’t like that. Like a desperate lover, I want you back. Talk to me, baby.
