LE MORTE D’3JAKE

The link to 3Jake is gone, at the blogger’s request. Her site fell victim to unwanted attention — an interesting side effect of a process that makes the private public and sets even the most unlikely of people on the path to attention-getting. While there are private blogs for communication between small groups, blogs that are creative or even intended as diaries tend to be public and available for serendipitous discovery.

In her very first post at Vermillion Fishnets, some girl named Shawnie discusses how unhappy she is that the boy she met last night — at first she cannot remember his name — is spending the night, as this is always uncomfortable for her. Over at Tasty Trixie, which is for all those who “want to know about the life of a webcam girl, amateur internet porn slut, & phone sex chick,” visitors will learn that Callie the cat has been put to sleep (a picture of the cat, when alive, is provided, with Trixie sprawled next to it, half off a couch and more than half naked), but also that Trixie has “severe PMS.” With Waterbones, readers know the bonking schedule of the kids upstairs, that Waterbones isn’t bonking and sometimes that her heart is breaking ... and that it gets tricky when she knows multiple boyfriends, ex-boyfriends and her mother and theirs are all reading.

Increasingly, we are living our lives in public, no doubt partially inspired by the exposure we get into every facet of celebrities’ lives. We know who’s gay, who’s had plastic surgery, who needs it, who’s broken up, who shared a steamy elevator ride, who fought last weekend, and with reality television, we are learning more of these things about pseudo-celebrities as well. With blogs, since no one’s asking, we reveal these things about ourselves. We’re celebrities, too. The more we reveal, the more attention we get. Even less personal blogs are about attention: Whether we’re being read, whether people liked it, whether people are commenting. We love attention.

But not from the wrong people. Each blog has a wrong reader, and knowing the wrong reader is out there, watching, has a chilling effect. Suddenly the most interesting things a blogger could write are the worst possible things to reveal.

The penultimate option becomes to write about things that are less interesting.

There’s a motivator.

The ultimate option, of course, is ending the blog, and ultimately that’s what 3Jake did. Unexpectedly, too, giving no one time to read a favorite post one last time. So I’m inviting 3Jake to send a guest posting here, every once in a while, if she’d like.

My wrong readers will be looking, but they won’t matter to her. And she still gets the attention.