I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for the idea that fans are not insane — that we are perfectly sensible people who are generally quite capable of recognizing the differences between, say, characters and actors, or rock star personae and the people who wear those masks.

So it troubles me no end when people try to post comments on this blog that confuse the fact that I have written ABOUT someone with the illusion that the someone about whom I have written is either behind this blog or likely to be reading it.

This happens a lot with … I fear to use their names lest they generate even more misguided search hits than they already do, so I’ll just say… a really big British pop star whose fan site manager I interviewed and a youtube teenage sensation who’s happy to take credit for having gained his success online.

It makes me wonder what is going on … are these people totally internet illiterate and really don’t understand that a comment on my blog will never ever be read by the person to whom they’re addressing it? Or are they just throwing comments up everywhere figuring eventually he’s going to see one somewhere? Messing with me? Just not paying attention? Or what?

I just don’t get it.

Actually, now that I think about it, it also happened when I wrote about that really beloved racehorse whose name I won’t use but whose fan community became an activist community following his death. I got all kinds of creepy comments submitted on that one, as though the horse’s trainer were reading the comments, in which case I’d have hoped he was standing by with his lawyers cuz that was some ugly stuff they were trying to do through me.

Strangely, it never happens when I write about people (or animals) who aren’t really famous. Guess it’s some sort of natural law — the more fans you get, the more likely you are to get some who can’t tell comment@onlinefandom.com from YourFavoriteStar@Personal.TopSecret.EmailAddress.com

It makes me want to institute universal internet literacy education in grade schools throughout the world. Because if they’re confused about that, what else are they confused about?

Any other bloggers want to tell weird-comments-i-delete-that-aren’t-spam stories?