Day 10

Yesterday, I revealed to my sister the existence of this blog and the purpose of my experiment. I don’t really remember why I felt the need to do so; it just came up in the course of our conversation (it seemed only fair, seeing that it’s her guinea pig enjoying his greens over there on the left). At this point, given that I did not tell her the url of this page but did tell her not to look for it, I’m not sure if and how it will affect what I write here. To some degree, I am more willing to write openly when I know nobody is reading. Yet eventually I do hope to be discovered by somebody out there in the great WWW. While I don’t believe that her knowledge of this page spoils the experiment – the experiment, more specifically, was to see how long it took for someone to acknowledge my presence here online, not to simply notice, and if she never visits the blog, she will never really acknowlede it in a measureable way (i.e., leave a comment) – I do fear that I’ve added a variable that dilutes the purity of the results and conclusions that may otherwise have been gathered from my dastardly little plot (meaning that the little plot is dastardly, and that the plot is dastardly little. Yes, I am both clever and mysterious) (Moving right along then…).

Unless he specifically intends otherwise, a person walking into a room full of people will always be noticed by some of those people merely on account of his physical presence – he will make noise, he will displace air, his motion will be sensed by those nearest to him. This seems, from my non-scientific perspective, to be simple biology and physics (unless he’s a ninja or something, which I believe then falls under the category of “specifically intends otherwise”). It is another thing altogether to be acknowledged by others in that room. That is, there is a difference between simply being known of and truly being known. We humans need more than just to be in the proximity of others; we need to be recognized by those others, valued by those others. Even the most introverted people in the world, those who believe they are completely independent from their society, even those most capable of self-sustenance need some level of validation from their peers. We are a body, very literally as Scripture asserts, only capable of functioning when others make up for what we ourselves lack.

Understanding that basic human need for validation, it was only inevitable that I would eventually tell somebody of my new online presence. I just figured that I would be able to endure complete anonymity for longer than 9 days…