Re: [-empyre-] C. S. Peirce and Code

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au>]

around the 17/10/05 fmadre@free.fr mentioned about Re: [-empyre-] C. 
S. Peirce and Code that:
> the blog is a very linear form of writing, it has a beginning which is easily
> identifiable and most of them have an end, thankfully
> as for "real" (?) hypertext I would say that they all have a beginning too,
> finding the end is more problematic, it could be said that when you have been
> thru all the items it is that you have reached the end
> or, in this piece
> http://pleine-peau.com/now/
> the end is when you are getting bored with it.

from my (blogging and hypertext) perspective this belies a 
misunderstanding about what a blog is.

I write a blog. It supports trackback. You write in your blog and 
link to my post. This connection is recorded by my blog as a 
trackback. Where does my blog begin and end? Yours? I stopped writing 
12 months ago. Trackbacks still accrue. is my blog 'ended'? If links 
are the economy here (and they are) then it seems specious to think 
that my blog is 'finished' or has an 'end'.

All works have a literal beginning and end. This was done to death in 
naive criticism of hypertext circa 1996. They are not nonlinear. They 
are multilinear. Where does my blog begin? the first post? why? Since 
that is now at the *end* of the temporal fragments (if you wanted to 
read in the usual reverse temporal order). Perhaps it begins with the 
first link in to my blog? To the blog or to an individual post? Does 
that matter? All of these are beginnings, all legitimate. So yes, 
there is a beginning, but it isn't *the* beginning. And that is a 
difference.

Blogs are emergent ecologies that rely on links. Links are the 
fundamental transaction. (See Weinberger, Walker, Tosca, and myself 
for stuff on this.) They are an excess (in Bataille's sense of a 
general economy) that blogs celebrate, even when business is busy 
trying to appropriate them (but as an excess this will always only be 
partial). They are porous to the network in ways that most other 
writing to the web, certainly everyday popular writing, never 
achieved. Every current system of authority in blogging (as far as I 
know), relies on links in to determine authority. I cannot write 
links in. I am subject to the network for that.

This is exciting and novel. It is emergent, it has strange attractors 
and threshold states. And yes, there are bad blogs. There are bad 
novels too, and bad films (music, dance, plays). But the worst blogs 
are those that mistake network ecologies for diary writing :-)
--
cheers
Adrian Miles

hypertext.RMIT
<URL:http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vlog>