Who am I blogging for?

Hal Finney warns us to consider our audience broadly while blogging, because our online content may be more persistent in the future than we imagine.

"These words may be read by some hundreds of people today.  But they will go into the archives and be available for decades.  If only a few people per year read them, then even without great changes, by a hundred years from now the future readers will have outnumbered the present ones."

I'm inclined to take this advice with a grain of salt.  (To use a very old euphemism - one that would probably be too outdated and too culturally-bound for Finney's tastes.)

Not every piece of communication should be prepared for eternal consumption.  Just as there is a place in this word for spontaneous speech, there is a place on the Internet for spontaneous, and short-lived, writing.  My blog may be such a place.

Finney recommends that bloggers speak broadly to all cultures and for all times.  I disagree.  I think that the most important advances on the Internet in recent years have been in usability, and many usability advances have helped us filter, prioritize, and ignore.

On the net, less is often more; the fewer pages I scan while searching, the better.  This means I must filter, filter, filter.

One useful filter is date, another is popularity.  If something old hasn't been accessed and used many times, then perhaps it deserves to go away.  Its just communication, after all.  For most of human history, words died with the person who spoke them.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  A mother's babblings to her infant are as important as any speech in the world, but they need not be preserved.  Likewise, an amateur philosopher's musings may be interesting in the time and place for which they were written, but the great value of philosophy is in creating thoughts anew, not preserving them forever.

Besides, isn't more valuable to us to communicate naturally, and then use technology to filter, find, and facilitate our communication, rather than forcing ourselves to communicate in the way that happens to suit our current technology?

There is something I appreciate in Finney's advice.  He reminds us to envision our audience, understand who they are, and let them know who we are writing for.  I think all writers would be wise to remember this.

We should write in a way that helps the reader of today understand our frame of reference, and allows the reader of tomorrow to filter.

What am I living for, if not for you,

What am I living for, if not for you,

What am I living for, if not for you,

Nobody else, nobody else will do.

 - Ray Charles