A blog page, perhaps containing bits of poetry and fiction, exists in the bowels of the internet, yet no one sees or reads it. The page is updated regularly but is only ever seen by the writer. Does it exist?
This is a little bit more complicated than "if a tree falls in the forest..." A book, a journal, a scrap of paper: these are physical things. They have a distinct form and time/space coordinate. They can be touched, held, eaten if one so desires. If no one reads these pages, they may not be part of any particular subjective experience, but they still exist as phenomena which can be perceived, can be apprehended by a human sensory mechanism.
A blog or web-based literature, however, does not have a comprehensible form until someone chooses to look at it. That is, it may exist as coding in a computer network, but it will not manifest as a text until someone specifically looks it up on the internet. Until that point, it is merely a potential text, a literary electron which exists as potential and probability, and does not have a fixed location in time and space. Once the text is located by a web browser, it will cohere on a screen as a grid of visible energy, without distinguishing auditory, olfactory, or textural characteristics. It can be said that all objects in our perception are fundamentally nothing more than energy grids (for example, a human body is made up of over 99% empty space -- we perceive each other as solid objects based on the energy fields created by the particles we are composed of), but digital information is unique in that it is a projection of data which maintains its physical characteristics even as its contents change. For instance, when text is viewed on a computer screen, the screen itself does not change. The weight and texture of a Kindle will not change depending on what text it is displaying -- a five-page essay will have the same heft and feel as Infinite Jest or a 100-year-old edition of Les Miserables. The only difference in the device will be the slightly different quality of light traveling to the reader's eyes from the screen. Further, if the device is turned off or the text is deleted, the device will not be changed in a noticeable/sensually-perceptible way. It will weigh the same; it will smell the same. The device itself can be altered, damaged, destroyed; however, this modification is distinct and separate from the life of the text(s) it displays.
It doesn't make much difference whether the texts in question are stored on the device itself or online. Since it doesn't manifest as a phenomenon which can be recognized by human senses until it is called upon. Thus, the question: does a blog which isn't read by anyone exist? Perhaps as a potential, but not specifically, and not now, in this distinct time and space, which is a foreign corner of the universe to most of us, in which graspable, killable, fuckable objects are rapidly giving way to potential holograms, maybe-worlds, ones and zeroes which are flickers of electric light within microchips, patterns which may never be accessed but lay imbedded, microscopically, as bits of code in silicon. Not only some wayward soul's web journal, but The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Leaves of Grass, The Odyssey, shrunken from their original grandeur until they can fit a million times over in the space of a human thumbnail. The world in a grain of sand.
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