Cybertime, Blogtime

Time is one of my areas of interest. No, strike that, area is a spatial metaphor, and it is very important to understand that time is not space, even though we tend to conceptualize time in spatial terms.

Time is one of my favorite topics. Wait, strike that as well, topic has the root meaning of place, which is why we refer to our initial topic as "in the first place," followed by "in the second place," and so on down the line. The point being that topic is also a spatial metaphor, one that is deeply embedded, not immediately obvious, but nonetheless present.

Time is an ongoing interest of mine, and a longstanding concern. There, I've used the temporal terms ongoing and longstanding to refer to time, although going and standing actually refer to motion and posture in space, so maybe I still have not overcome the tendency (that we all share) to spatialize time .

Time is very difficult to discuss. At least without making reference to space. But it is an interest of mine, and something of a theme for this blog, not that I intentionally set out to make this a blog about time. In fact, I came up with the title on the fly, on the run, the idea being that this blog would just be a way of passing the time, nothing momentous (of course, McLuhan said that pastimes are past times, capturing something about an earlier era's social relations). What also flashed through my mind when I came up with "Blog Time Passing" was "long time passing," a phrase from the song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," a song that was ubiquitous when I was a kid. But maybe it's not as well known today, so I will include the lyrics here, just in case.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE 
words and music by Pete Seeger
performed by Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Anyway, I have discussed time a number of, well, times on this blog, and also in several publications. My most extensive writing on the subject is in a book chapter entitled "Cybertime" which was first published in 1996 in the first edition of an anthology that I co-edited with Ron Jacobson and Stephanie Gibson, and which was reprinted in the second edition of that same anthology, Communication and Cyberspace (published in 2002). In that essay, I looked at cybertime as the counterpart to cyberspace, and considered many different aspects of time as it relates to computers, computer-mediated communication, and online interaction.

I didn't say anything about blogs in that chapter, however, because they were too new to be included. But now I'm an old hand at this blogging game, an experienced blogist with two months, almost, under my belt--in case it's not clear, I'm kidding, I know I'm noveau blog. But it didn't take me long to notice the strange sense of time that blogs generate. On the one hand, like handwritten logs, blogs record entries in chronological order--Captain's Blog, Stardate 4192007. But unlike written log books, which follow the sequence from top of the page to bottom, and page by page from the front of the book to the back, blogs move in reverse gear. The latest blog entry occupies the position analogous to the top of the page and front of the book, and as we scroll down we encounter earlier posts in backwards chronological order. And when we get to the bottom, we can click on a link for "Older Posts" and go back in time again to the second most recent set of entries.

As I jump from one topic to another in my blog entries, the chronological sequence, and reverse order, do not matter all that much. In this sense, blogs are more like websites and hypertexts, that is, having more of a spatial orientation than a temporal one. But the oddity of this format really becomes apparent when a discussion that I get into in one post carries over into the next. At that point, the second part of the discussion comes up before the first. This has happened several times, for example in the previous two posts:

• The Bell Tolls For Us
• Yom Hashoah

where Yom Hashoah is the first post, and The Bell Tolls For Us continues on the same topic. Another example is

• Postscript to God and the Machines
• God and the Machines

In this instance, the reverse order is readily apparent. Then there is

• The Medium is the Midrash
• The Matzo is the Message

In this example, the connection is looser, and on the face of things, the two titles seem to work out because they follow the pattern of "the medium is the message" (but read the actual content of the posts and it becomes clear that they are backwards). Sometimes the sequence is not only in reverse order but interrupted by other posts, as in

• Eye Blog!
• Military Personae
• Death Becomes Her
• Lost Legs
• The Fraternal Community
• I Blog!
• Let's Go Mets!
• Why Blog?

Where the first in the group was Why Blog? followed, two posts later, by I Blog! Five entries later I added as a joke Eye Blog! Discontinuity is nothing new when it comes to the electronic media. That's what the medium is television is all about, what Neil Postman referred to by the phrase "And Now, This..." in his classic work of media ecology Amusing Ourselves to Death (now in a new edition with an introduction by Neil's son Andrew). One last example, the earliest, of a backwards sequence is

• Blogist
• Blogism

The term blog is short for we(b log). But maybe it should instead represent b(ackwards) log. This is a fairly unique representation of time, and I am hard pressed to find another example. McLuhan did talk about the idea of the effects preceding the causes, related to the concept of formal cause that I mentioned in passing in a previous post. McLuhan was also interested in the narrative form of detective stories, which generally start with the end result of a chain of events, the crime, and try to trace the sequence back to the beginning in order to identify the guilty party. But in that genre, the tendency is not to move sequentially back in time, but rather to jump around back and forth, putting the pieces together. Sort of like being unstuck in time, to reference another recent post.

There was an episode of Seinfeld entitled "The Betrayal" (Season 9, episode # 164) that followed the same format as a blog, in that each narrative segment moved us back in time in sequence, showing how the conclusion we began with came to be. Of course, within each segment the narrative moved forward in time, otherwise it would be incomprehensible, just as within a blog entry, the words, and time, moves forward. I have found a transcript of the episode online, and wouldn't it be interesting to translate the script into a blog?

So, we have a new concept of time now, a new form of cybertime, we have blogtime. In blogtime, we move forward into the past and we, in effect, reverse engineer the blog, and the blogist alike. And so it goes.