The Naked Blogger

Writers have long angled for readers' attention by adopting personae—public images whose proximity or distance to their actual selves became a tantalizing subject for debate. The Marquess of Queensberry probably had this in mind when he scribbled that Oscar Wilde had been "posing as a somdomite [sic]." As far as His Lordship was concerned, Wilde wasn't gay; he was just going through the motions—to the point of engaging rent boys—to boost his sales figures. Writers who chose to promote themselves in this fashion performed a kind of fan dance for their public. They might flash some skin every once in a while, but in the dim light of the cabaret, who could really tell?

But there are signs that blog readers prefer a person to a persona. Returning to the same site day after day for updates that appear at intervals of mere hours, they've claimed a large enough stake in the blogger's world that they expect to be confided in, not tantalized.

Last fall in Slate, Tom Scocca observed (with no small amount of glee) that blogger Pamela Geller had usurped Ann Coulter's pride of place among conservative pundits. If there's any truth in that, I think I know the reason. Coulter, for all her breaches of good taste, comports herself as a traditional public intellectual. She keeps aloof from her readers, writing a weekly column, and appearing for large sums to give speeches. Whether writing or giving interviews, her strategy is to keep 'em guessing—did she really mean that, or is she, to use Queensberry's word, posing?

Geller, by contrast, is all grim earnestness. When she accuses the Park51 imam of "totalitarian Khomeiniism," or when she imputes "Goebbels-like" propaganda to a Huffington Post column, she's not being arch or hyperbolic. She means exactly what she says. Though Geller is the furthest thing from a literary stylist, her readers can at least rest assured that they are in possession of her deepest thoughts and firmest convictions, such as these are.

This new transparency, this expectation of intimacy between writer and reader, has claimed its share of casualties. Some writers, frankly, look best behind the veil. In Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff wonders whether readers will be able to appreciate Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, now that a decade of Internet-driven scrutiny has made the author's "prickliness" and "pretension" part of his brand. As Yabroff astutely observes, the fact that Franzen burns up half of his author video kvetching about having to appear in an author video, can't help his cause much.

As I prepare to launch my first big-boy blog, I find myself in a paradoxical position. Without this new egalitarianism, I'd never have gotten a venue. A dropout of the master's program at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunications, I have no real credentials. I have never covered a journalistic beat, never worked my way up from the police desk (if such things still exist). I belong to a by-now familiar type: the half-baked polymath who taught himself to write on message boards and in chatrooms. Not only will I have to sell myself to readers who may in fact know my subjects better than I do, I'll get to see their feedback metastasize in the combox, an arena I will enter my peril.

All this freedom and interconnectedness is a great thing—love it. But it's also made a mug's game mugsier than ever. It might make me; it could just as easily break me.

Some ingenious writers have milked the medium to put their more irksome readers on notice. In "Personalities of the Catholic Combox," National Catholic Register columnist Pat Archbold lampooned "Encyclical Man," "Throw out Your Television Man" and others. I shamelessly stole the idea in "Nine Types of Catholic Commenters." In their way, both pieces were revolutionary. Archbold and I were booing our own boo-birds as surely as any baseball team could do by lining up facing the bleachers and chanting, "CHEAPSKATES!" or "COUCH POTATOES." For readers, it was a backhanded acknowledgment of parity. Their heckling mattered enough to deserve a counter-heckling.

This piece begins with dirty war and ends with counterrevolution - not signs of a positive mental outlook. It doesn't do for a writer to scare himself silly like this. Readers aren't all scary. Shoot, I'm one myself. Why, I can read Maureen Dowd and Pat Buchanan in a single day without charging a barricade. In fact, the last blogger I responded to critically ended up offering me a job. Instead of formulating defensive strategies, maybe I ought to solve my reader-relations problems on the front end, by making sure I look good naked.