Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Almost by definition, a blog is never finished. It may stop, but that isn't the same thing. The person writing it may declare it finished, but who is to say they won't change their mind? It may be taken offline, but that's not a completion, it's an abdication. A blog will always be a work in progress.

No, I'm not thinking about the end of WalkyTalky. That of course will happen someday -- I might be hit by a falling piano tomorrow, or, less slapstickly, become disenchanted with the whole business and just gradually stop writing -- but that's no more worth worrying about than the fact that we're all going to die sooner or later. At one level, ignoring it may be a denial of reality; but really, denial is terribly underrated: it's pretty much a necessity of the human condition. Without it, how would we get through the day? Life may be purposeless and meaningless in the long term, but that's not where we live. In the short term, things matter.

Anyway, what I'm thinking about is whether any kind of meaningful ongoing structure can apply to something as fleeting and amorphous as a blog. Or, for that matter, to hypertext in general.

The first fully-fledged hypertext novel I know of is Geoff Ryman's 253, which is now 7 or 8 years old. You could argue about plenty of other works: classic text-adventure "interactive fiction" from Zork to Graham Nelson's Curses; print-based "Choose Your Own Adventure" books like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or Kim Newman's later and infinitely more interesting Life's Lottery; oddballs like David Thomson's seminal Suspects and the sprawling, overlapping patchwork of fictions that make up the Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock and friends; even, if you want to be especially bloody-minded about it, Tristram Shandy. But 253 is the first that was deliberately conceived to be published on the web. Even so, when you get right down to it, 253, browser fiction though it may be, still works better in paperback.

The web experience is bitty and disparate. It mitigates against controlling structures. It mitigates against concentration. It favours the short and pithy over the long and considered. It favours the explicit over the implicit. It doesn't want you to make links in your brain, it wants to put them right there on the page -- and underline them.

Blogs are, on the whole, optimized for that environment. They are a transient form. Bitty and disparate. In place of a plan, they have the relentless march of time. They branch through links and comments and trackbacks into a fractal structure of imprecise dimension. There can be no right way to read them, no real order.

Of course, the same can be said for traditional writing. Now matter how much meticulous planning goes into a piece, the reader inevitably rewrites it according to their own plan as they go along. All communication is a two-way street, or it is not communication at all.

So, can a blog have a meaningful structure? Of course it can. It can develop, and build, and refer back to itself, and contradict itself. It can be subtle and implicit or brash and blatant.

What it can't do -- which is to say, what its author can't do -- is expect its readers to give a flying fuck about any of that.

But then, who can?

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Enough of that navel-gazing drivel. I've added a new page to the photo album. Not, it must be said, a very cheerful one. Apparently I'm in a maudlin humour tonight.
Posted by matt at September 5, 2003 02:34 AM