I know this post “dates” me as someone who started blogging back in the peak era of blogging in the mid 2000s. But what the hell!Â
I think you can consider yourself to have “made it” as a blogger when a post that you write attracts abuse. Sometimes this abuse could be in public, in the comments section of the blog. At other times, the abuse is in private, when someone meets you or calls you, and abuses you for writing what you wrote.
As long as you’ve been reasonable in your blogging (which the early years of this blog’s predecessor cannot exactly claim), abuse on your comments section is more of an indicator of the thin-skinnedness of the abuser, rather than you crossing lines on what you should write about.
At this point in time, it is pertinent to introduce the class of people who I call as “anti-bloggers”. Sometimes they might themselves have a blog, but that is not necessary, what is necessary is that they have a “holier than thou” attitude.
Anti-bloggers are people with especially thin skins who are always on the lookout for something to outrage about, and blogs, which allow people to express themselves freely on a public forum without editorial oversight, are a common whipping boy.
This outrage could come in several forms. The thicker-skinned version of this outrage happens from people who abuse you only if they think you’ve abused them on the blog (good bloggers take care to never mention names in a negative manner, so this is usually a case of “kumbLkai kaLLa heglmuTT nODkonDa” (the pumpkin thief looked at his shoulder; it’s a Kannada proverb meaning something like “every thief has a straw in his beard) ).
The thinner skinned version of anti-bloggers find it even easier to find things to outrage about. Look at the Bangalore post I’d written ten years back. There was no hint that I’d written about anyone at all, but the post received heaps of abuse, from people who manufactured some kind of entity that the post purportedly offended!
The most annoying anti-bloggers are those that abuse you when you simply pen down an observation that is there for all to see. I won’t take specific examples now, but sometimes the simple act of reporting a fact that is evident to everyone can offend people, for its existence on paper (a website, rather) gives it new-found legitimacy!
This last bit can also help explain the annoyance of some sections of the “mainstream media” with “social media” such as blogs/twitter. The worthies in the mainstream media had established certain unwritten rules by which certain facts/events wouldn’t be put down on paper.
The mention of these events in social media (which is unedited) suddenly gave these events/happenings sudden legitimacy, which steered the overall narrative away from where it existed during the mainstream media monopoly, annoying the mainstream media!
One penultimate point – anti-bloggers are the same people who talk about the glories of the days prior to social media (this piece in The Guardian is an especially strong specimen), when people could only read news that was filtered and possibly censored by newspaper editors.
And finally, ever since my credentials as a blogger were established about a decade back, some people have started explicitly mentioning to me when they are saying something “off the record”. And I’ve always respected these conditions!