The image constituted through the combination of statistics and the experience of a single blogger is too easy, even as it highlights the juxtaposition between the singular and the many characteristic of contemporary networked media. Rather than relying on one to stand in for an impossible whole, we do better to consider the rise of personalized media as a mass phenomenon and practice. By 2008, there were from 80 million to 120 million blogs.<sup>4</sup> The overwhelming majority of these blogs appears and dies in a matter of months, having been seen by few, if any, readers. Blogs are many and innumerable, an open, changing set of unique expressions. At the same time, the standardization supplied by blog services—the basic page layouts, archival features, titles, banners, ads, and widgets—format blogs as ultimately interchangeable, the same, one virtually indistinguishable one from another.
The common format that makes blogs blogs is a condition for the unique productions of singular bloggers. And vice versa: without the unique oferings, indeed, the promise that each voice can be heard, each experience documented, each opinion expressed, blogging has no point.
We can approach this same entanglement from a diferent direction: blogs ofer exposure and anonymity at the same time. As bloggers we expose ourselves, our feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and aversions. Yet we often write as if we’ve opened ourselves to nearly no one, to just a select few, to a small community of those we trust, perhaps because we cannot see them. Knowing full well that we are one among millions, we may find ourselves relieved not to have so many hits, so many comments. Strangers and opponents remind us of our exposure, our visibility, vulnerability, and ultimate lack of control.
Blogs can be useful political tools: they let activists report on their activities, plans, and aspirations. They help them meet up and coordinate. At the same time, they deliver a lot of knowledge to activists’ opponents—the university oficials wanting to know which students are responsible for the sit-in, the law enforcement oficials trying to diminish the impact of planned demonstrations to discourage activists from going too far. Privacy and consumer protection advocates remind us of the accumulation of data on consumers, data easily mined for the sake of the increasingly specific and personalized targeting of ads. Yet this information in need of protection is the open content of millions of blogs and social network profiles. Blogs make monitoring easy. There’s no need to spy! I’ll tell you everything—and more! In short, blogging relies on a fantasy of exposure without exposure correlative to the indistinguishable mass of the singularly unique. It’s like the thrill of telling a secret without being burdened by anxiety over its being told—exposure without exposure.
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