Reading

Here’s a sobering thought. I've now written 14 blog items for (184) Burmese Days over 5 months, and most blogs out there fail to live beyond 6 months; a statistic I'll reinforce because I inadvertently put the length of time into its name.

During those 5 months I have wondered what the demographic of readers might be, or how many people might have read it. That's fun to do, and I can see some statistics, but what has just struck me is how many people couldn't have read it, even if they wanted to.

In the entire world, the number of people with access to the internet is roughly 2.5 billion, leaving more than 4.5 billion people without access, the majority of whom are illiterate women. That’s already a lot of people I've missed out. I appear to be shooting for the rich, educated, male demographic of the world's population, a desperately small and unfair proportion.

Of those who are educated, not everyone speaks English. But, assuming my English writing can be translated to any language via the magic of Her Googleness I don’t have to worry about that number and I can focus instead on the small number of people who have a level of education that stretches beyond 12 years of schooling (i.e. if you started school at 5, then you left school at least aged 17). Without trawling the web for stats, I think we can safely say it isn't very many people at all.

Why 12 years' schooling? Because that's apparently how many years' education you need to understand my blog on the first read without throwing your phone/tablet/laptop/PC out the window, onto the head of a passing pony. I arrived at this figure using the FOG index, which calculates the number of big, bad words you use against the length of your sentences and the banality of your tone. Not really the last one.

This is 6 years more than your average comic book, 4 years more than gossip magazines, and 2 years more than Time magazine. If you haven’t killed any ponies yet then I’d guess you were a bright so and so, and quite above those sniveling Time magaziners. Either that or my calculations are wrong.

This puts it firmly in the “professional business writing” category, which wasn't my intention, and you would rightly scoff at the suggestion. Not many business writers go on about killing ponies.

To reach everyone else, my only option is to walk the streets of the world and shout stuff at everyone, like your local bearded man who you thought was crazy. But now you've got a reason to listen; he’s just trying to maximise his audience. He’s only missing the deaf, the agoraphobic, the infirm elderly, the babies, those who speak different languages, those who ignore him, and those who are at home on the internet reading blogs about Myanmar. And ponies.