I spy with my little browser

I have a con­fes­sion to make: I have recently been engaged in the unwhole­some and despic­able act of spying.

I have been spy­ing on people I know — not close friends, admit­tedly; more like acquaint­ances, people I pass in the cor­ridor, people I’ve spoken to once or twice, people who are friends of friends.

This has involved no bug­ging devices, no skulk­ing in the shad­ows, no stalk­ing, not even a glass held up against a par­ti­tion wall. No, it’s far sim­pler than any of those meth­ods. The awful truth is that I’ve been con­duct­ing my spy­ing mis­sions through the medium com­monly known as The Blog.

One even­ing a few weeks ago, whilst idly click­ing round a few sites, I happened across a web­log by someone I know. As I have already made abund­antly clear, this isn’t a friend or con­fid­ant. Instead, it’s a per­son I’ve talked to a mere hand­ful of times, but about whom I had — child­ishly and unfairly — already formed an unfa­vour­able opin­ion (and you may as well inter­pret ‘unfa­vour­able’ as mean­ing ‘bitchy’). To put it even more bluntly, I had always thought that this per­son was a two-faced, arse-licking goody-goody, yet their blog reveals quite another side to their char­ac­ter. He/she has a wicked sense of humour, and a sar­castic bite to their words. The more I read, the more appeal­ing I find his/her char­ac­ter — although I’m not yet con­fid­ent enough in my opin­ion to approach the per­son con­cerned, cough loudly, and nervously start a con­ver­sa­tion with the open­ing gam­bit: “Are you aware that I read your weblog?”

The dis­cov­ery of that site, in turn, revealed links to sites by other acquaint­ances and names that are famil­iar from from the gen­eral social whirl. It set me off on a quest across the web — using Google, I searched on the names of ran­dom people from both my past and my present whom I thought might pos­sibly be blog­gers. Scar­ily, in a few cases I was actu­ally proved right.

How­ever, a ter­rible sense of guilt has now set in, and I can’t help but feel a bit dirty. I won­der whether I should declare myself to each of these blog­gers as being one of their read­ers. If they were friends, I would cer­tainly do so. But as they’re just acquaint­ances — well, I quite enjoy the voyeur­istic aspect. I’m look­ing at cer­tain people in a whole new light (and thank­fully, that light is mostly a pos­it­ive one), whilst get­ting a little insight into the way their minds work; even, in a few cases, how they view the same things that I view.

Let’s make one thing abund­antly clear, though. It’s one rule for them and an entirely dif­fer­ent rule for me, OK? This is com­pletely selfish, but also entirely neces­sary. So, bear­ing in mind how freaked out I’ve been in the past when people I know in the real (i.e. non-blogging) world have revealed that they read this site, I would now ask any­one who knows me through activ­it­ies that don’t involve web­logs to declare them­selves below. Then we can talk about it face to face — like respons­ible adults — before I beg you to swear a vow of secrecy on the mat­ter and never men­tion this URL to any­one ever again.

Per­fectly reas­on­able beha­viour, don’t you think?

The web is a sick­en­ing and immoral place. In a few short weeks, it’s turned me into a guilt-ridden, para­noid voyeur. Oh, the shame.