Stacks

I’ve been thinking more about the genre model of blogs as journals. While it is a comfortable metaphor (when compared with oxymetaphors like cyberspace or blogosphere), it really doesn’t work. Letters are closer, because they have a more abstract time-constituent. Letters are read based on priorities: the newest letter isn’t always read first. A person reads a letter from a friend much more quickly than one reads a letter from a bill collector, and a letter from a bill collector before one reads an advertisement. But time is still a factor, because old letters never garner much attention. You have to be in a rather twisted mood to sit around reading old letters.

Journals are modeled on the book. They run in a linear order, and the newest information is found in the back. When one is completed, it is filed away, perhaps in a stack of old journals. Letters end up in stacks a lot quicker. Journals are more task oriented, even if the only task in mind is to finish that particular journal. Letters don’t really end. They kick around for a while, waiting for us to answer them. Their only commercial print analogue would probably be the broadsheet. If there is a sale we want to visit, or a show we’d like to see, broadsheet fliers stick around until we either decide not to act on them, or the event passes and they become mute. Fliers and broadsheets aren’t linear. They are lateral, often spreading to cover every shelf or building (if they’re pasted) in sight— so we feel compelled to colate them in stacks.

Unbound, the letter (or flier) does not have a natural order. But we collect them in stacks (and not necessarily chronological ones). To peruse them, we don’t turn the stack over and start at the bottom (at least I don’t!). It’s been a long time (twenty years or more) since I did any computer programming, but I seem to recall that computers work the same way. Things are pushed on to the stack, read from the stack without being moved, or popped off the stack into a different register. Last in is first off. Data at the bottom is overwritten if too much data goes on top. But as long as an item resides in the stack, you can at least point to it.

I think that blogs are more like stacks than journals. We don’t usually visit the bottom, unless some pointer (usually a search query or link) shows up in a referrer log. Though they are chronological (newest on top rather than at the back), their chronological nature is not nearly as important as their access pattern. The latest is read first, and the stack we choose to read first depends on its relevance (or social connection) to us.