The Unexpected Guest in the Digital Seminar Room

On Reading, Statistics, and Invisible Visitors

I have spent more time than I intended trying to understand the traffic to my blog, Practical Philosophy. For many years, it has led a relatively quiet and familiar life. Readers have come and gone, some through a search for Kierkegaard or Buber, others because they were looking for texts on shame, professional ethics, social work, or what it means to live a human life. The numbers have varied, but the landscape has been familiar.

Then something changed. Suddenly, the statistics showed tens of thousands of visits. This month the figure had already passed 30,000, after around 50,000 the month before. Even more puzzling was the map. For a while, Seychelles topped the list of countries sending traffic to the blog.

Seychelles has around 120,000 inhabitants. It is a beautiful island nation, but hardly the world centre of Norwegian-language practical philosophy. I had to smile at the thought that the islands, which also have a history associated with pirates, were now sending a new fleet towards my blog. This time the pirates did not arrive in sailing ships, but as small electronic requests directed at an archive of nearly a thousand posts.

Yet the smile was mixed with unease. Who or what was visiting me? And what does a visit mean when the visitor may not be human?

When the Map Does Not Match the Landscape

A traffic map looks convincing. Countries have colours, figures have decimals, and curves rise and fall. Such statistics give the impression that we are seeing the world as it is. But a map is not the landscape, and a visit is not necessarily a reader.

The most plausible explanation for the sudden growth is automated traffic. The internet is full of programs that move from page to page. Some index content for search engines. Others check whether a page has changed, follow links, collect language data, or test for technical weaknesses. A single machine can open many pages in a short time and leave behind a number for every hit. In a simple traffic counter, this can look like a mass migration.

But the statistics alone cannot tell me with certainty who is behind the traffic or what the purpose is. It is important to preserve this uncertainty. I know that the traffic is unusual. I can see the patterns. I can form reasonable hypotheses. But I cannot simply infer from a rise in the numbers that a particular artificial intelligence has read or stored my texts.

The distinction between what we see, what we assume, and what we actually know is itself an exercise in practical philosophy. Numbers invite quick narratives. Thought asks us to pause before believing them.

Who Is a Reader?

The question leads further. What does it mean to read? A robot can retrieve a page, register the words, and follow the links onwards. In a technical sense, it has visited the text. But has it read it?

In hermeneutics, reading is more than the reception of information. Gadamer describes understanding as a fusion of horizons, Horizontverschmelzung. The text comes with its history, and the reader comes with theirs. Something new may arise in the encounter between them: an old question becomes new, an experience finds language, or a firm conviction becomes less certain. The reader does not necessarily leave the text as the same person who began reading it.

A machine has no childhood it remembers, no shame it carries, no death it fears, and no future it hopes for. It can process the sentence, ‘the self is a relation that relates itself to itself’. It can find patterns around the words and offer a linguistically convincing explanation. But it has never stood at the abyss in Kierkegaard's sense. It risks nothing by reading.

This does not mean that machine-based language processing is without value. I use artificial intelligence myself as a conversation partner in my work with texts. It can help me notice repetitions, find a clearer structure, and try out a different expression. But the distinction between processing a text and being moved by it must not disappear. Otherwise, we impoverish both reading and the human being.

When Words Become Raw Material

Unease arises because a public text can take on a life other than the author intended. I have written Practical Philosophy as an open seminar room. The texts are published for people who want to read, think, and perhaps respond. When automated systems retrieve them on a large scale, the words can also be treated as raw material: as data, language patterns, or material in a commercial and technological process.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger describes technology as a way in which the world is disclosed. Through Ge-stell, beings appear as Bestand: something standing ready to be measured, stored, and used. The forest becomes timber, the river becomes energy, attention becomes a commodity - and the text becomes data.

The problem is not that a text can be used. Texts have always travelled between people, been quoted, interpreted, and placed in new contexts. The problem arises when their use blinds us to how they came into being. Behind a philosophical text lie hours and years of reading, experience, doubt, and rewriting. The words are not merely signs in a particular order. They are traces of a life lived and of work someone has undertaken.

At the same time, we should be careful not to give the machine too much power in our own imagination. The invisible guest can retrieve a copy of the page, but it cannot thereby take possession of the text's meaning. Meaning does not lie ready-made like an object that can be stolen. It arises anew when a human being reads, pauses, and responds.

The One Real Reader

A counter can record traffic, but not significance. A robot can open the entire archive without a single thought being thought. One human being can read one post and carry a sentence with them for the rest of the day.

For a blog devoted to practical philosophy, this is decisive. The purpose has never been traffic in itself. The purpose is for a thought to meet a life. Perhaps a student finds a language for professional shame. Perhaps a social worker feels less alone in a difficult ethical choice. Perhaps someone discovers in Kierkegaard that despair is not merely a feeling, but a relation to oneself. Such encounters cannot be measured by a counter.

The real reader, then, is not first and foremost a number in the statistics. The reader is a Thou. Martin Buber reminds us of the distinction between I-It and I-Thou. Automated traffic belongs largely to the world of It: registration, calculation, and use. But the blog is written in the hope of a Thou - a human being who does not merely pass by the text, but encounters it.

It is a more modest measure, but also a truer one. It helps me distinguish between noise and significance. Machines may take over much of the statistics. They cannot by themselves determine whether the text was worth writing.

Keeping the Door Open

There are technical ways to limit unwanted traffic, and in some situations it may be wise to use them. But this experience has also taught me that not every change in the landscape is a danger. A steep curve can be unsettling without being threatening. A strange country on the map may be a trace of how the internet is built, not a sign that someone means me harm.

I will therefore not allow the invisible visitors to drive the visible ones away. The digital seminar room will remain open. I do not write for the robots, but neither will I stop writing because they exist. Their presence has become part of the conditions under which we publish in our time, just as noise, misunderstandings, and chance passers-by have always been part of public life.

Perhaps the blogger, too, must learn something from the walker. On the road, the landscape is always changing. Some places are open and easy to survey; others are unfamiliar and difficult to read. One pauses, finds one's bearings, and continues. The road is no less real because the map is sometimes unclear.

The door remains open. Not for the traffic, but for the reader who enters, sits down, and begins to think.