Communications media journalists, specially graphics media, usually take for granted that they write for a specific target in particular, and that they can assume a certain type of agreement with them. Since, in order to access to newspapers and magazines one has to pay for them, common sense says the reader has a certain degree of agreement with the media, and its editorial line. In Communications Sciences this is called “reading contract”, from the semiologist Eliseo Veron. This “model reader”, by the way, can match the famous marketing “target”, but not necessarily; the importance of the reading contract is rather based on the journalists’ need to take for granted certain readers’ characteristics and to establish a bond with them.

Now well: what happens in the Net with blogs? Unlike many communications media, access to this kind of support is much more diverse. Even when we write with a certain kind of reader in mind, we can get visitors with radically opposite opinions, or who don’t know some basic information from which we start off. Many times we adapt our writing to direct not only to our idea of reader, but also to avoid problems. We use what we could call “the worst reading contract”. To paraphrase Isaac Joseph and his text on Erving Goffman’s microsociologic theory, we assume that “there always exists an interpretation of your texts worse than the one you can imagine”. Even when we think we’ve written in a reflexive enough way as to cover the most usual critics, there will be those who will understand our writing in ways that we didn’t imagine.

And the text published in a blog, submitted to the public scrutiny of anyone who enters from any point of the Internet, is subject to the same rules we used in our everyday life when we face unknown people: “watch what you say, it’s best to know first who are we facing”. With time, we learn that certain topics are hard to handle; that if we criticize an album or a book, no matter how analytical the reading can be, there will always be someone offended. That there will be people who will get mad because we say our sincere opinion on a touristic destination. If we don’t appraise it, we’re being unfair; if we do, we’ve been bought.

As long as the text we publish on blogs are public and widely accesible, readings tend to be quite diverse, and that is part of the best and worst of this media. It’s interesting when it provides access to opinions and points of view that enriches the discussion and help broaden it. But it can also be frustating when an ellaborate text receives insults as a response -hidden under a pseudanonymity which is unusual in face to face environments-, completely aberrant readings or, simply, silence.

Could it be that the famous reading contract, that bond we have with our readers, is built with the pass of the years? If this expectation is reasonable, we may think that in the long run we will take for granted who are we writing for. Or will the idea of having in mind “the worst reading contract” prevail? Will the Net’s diversity make us assume different kinds of readings every time we write a text to be published in our blogs? This point, besides, is interesting to academic blogs, that usually use a very specific terminology, but since they’re read by people that don’t belong to the academic field, they frequently find particular comments from other Net users. This tension between “writing for the academy” and “writing for the widest amount of people”, which of course is not exposed in the protected environment of the university, is part of the problems of academic blogs and their estragies to position themselves as legitimate knowledge builders. A place that, for now, universities occupy without many problems with publications such as books and papers.