secrets and mysteries

Blog! Karie expresses just as well as I could what Belle De Jour's reveal means to those of us bloggers who've been in this for the long haul. As I said to her on Facebook, it's like the UK blogging culture of the earlier part of this decade rearing up to reassert itself, reminding all the people for whom its just part of a social networking landscape where it all began.

At first I was elated to know that she was a real person and that it all happened and that I hadn't been reading a fiction all these years (something sort of knew because of interviews related to the television programme and friends of friends but it was nice to have a confirmation) and that in being a research scientist and an early UK link bloggers one of us.

I felt very warm towards some fellow bloggers who knew her secret, knew who she was, but didn't blab, even to each other. Again, it was reminder of the kind of community it was back then, before the form went mainstream and stopped being as Karie says "something you do on the sly", when no one knew what a blog was and thought it was a very curious thing to be doing.

Now, nearly, everyone online is a blogger even if it's just in very short sentences and I wonder if you can still close ranks on something like that when there are so many voices involved. If someone had worked out Belle's identity back in the day and Twitter had existed with its instant gratification, would they have kept it to themselves?

But then I felt anger, towards the Daily Mail for apparently forcing her into this, because after a fashion I didn't really want to know who Belle De Jour was. There are some secrets which are in the public interest of course, but has it really added to the world that people in general now know who she is, to have her face splashed all over the papers? Isn't it nice to have these little secrets and mysteries?