The Discourse on Not-Blogging, Part 5

Last week in a zero-draft, I thought I'd figured it out. I'm not blogging, I wrote. I'm serializing. I'm telling a story piece by piece. So the reader should come every day, to not get behind.

But it's not really my place to dictate exactly how someone interacts with my work. If I say, "Read my work every day, or else!" many people will comfortably choose "else." So I'm faced with a conundrum. I wish to build pieces that travel forward in time, as writing always has. But the format I publish in moves backwards.

The Discourse on Not-Blogging, Part 4

This is not a blog, I keep insisting. But.

I needed to re-familiarize myself on the discourse so far, so I went to the site today to read the pieces in their published context. And what I saw there sure as hell looks like a blog. It reads like a blog.

At the same time, because each piece in the discourse builds on the ones that came before it, it only works properly if the reader reads the pieces in order. Otherwise things get garbled.

Thus another problem with reverse chronology gets revealed.

The Discourse on Blogging and Not Blogging, Part 3

Excepting the occasional time that a certain piece comes to matter to people for some reason or another, a blog exists in an eternal present. It is about the now. That it's usually a single author, often about a single topic, makes it like a degenerate form of newspaper.

And unless there's a reason a piece garnered particular interest, a blogpost from a year ago is a like a newspaper from a year ago: a valueless artifact.

Why would I spend my time writing something like that?

The Discourse on Blogging and Not Blogging, Part 2

I thought about it and thought about it and puzzled about it and wrote about it and puzzled about it some more, and finally I decided it's this:

The blog's most defining characteristic is its reverse-chronology. Through its form, the blog insists that what's most important is what's most recently published. The further down the page the reader has to scroll, the more what's there fades in importance. It's like when you do a Google search. When was the last time you looked beyond the first page to find what you were looking for?

The Discourse on Blogging and Not Blogging, Part 1 (99 Problems)

Back in April of last year, I declared of the work I'm publishing here, This Is Not a Blog. But how useful is that? It's easy to say what something is not. This also is not a large automobile. It is not a pepperoni pizza.

But what is it? I've been struggling with that ever since. I've done a ton of drafting about it, trying to figure it out.

Before I could get any further, I first of all had to figure out what I really meant by blog.