Who is my audience?

Its answer comes in two varieties—the speculative answer and the factual one. The latter is easy because there’s data. 

These are unique visits, to be sure. And I’m sure I can account for most of these visits. They are people I’ve shared my links with or the poor TA who has to grade blogs. In essence, my audience is obliged to visit either because of vocation or directly being my friend.

But when I filter these views by country, the new data adds perspective.

That paints a different picture. I can account for all the Canadian and Chilean views, but the American and Chinese views are unaccounted for. Be sure you’re equipped with whatever sacred objects you own. Prepare for spirits as we cross the threshold between a positivist fact about viewers into a purely speculative investigation. 

My speculative audience are people who are very very lost. 

It’s not that my topics aren’t or couldn’t be interesting to generate a proper audience (‘a public’), but it’s just too early to say with any level of certainty. So even though I’m using tags and categories the best I can, the content and aesthetics don’t match… yet! 

Therefore, they must have typed something wrong, and the autocorrect did them some grievous injustice. Sending them spiralling into some unknown recess of the unobserved internet. 

I feel like my original theme was better suited for that. It was raw and weird. If those people did fall all the way to the bottom, I felt like the aesthetic should match. But I also feel sympathetic to lost people. Perhaps there is a later aesthetic goal in the concept of the last stop at the bottom of the pit or the very edge of space. So having an aesthetic that felt like the internet had come undone was not the best choice.

My theme now equally sucks. It’s functionally a wooden sign that reads, “Your viewership is my product.” Maybe it’s best just to embrace the chaos and lean into being the final level of the bunker. A place that, if you’ve arrived, there’s no going back up. So you may as well get comfortable.

For now, I just need to get into the habit of writing more and become comfortable with a faster pace of unique and engaging content. I don’t mind a slow development of aesthetics so long as I’m producing something interesting along the way.