Dear reader,
In the last post of last year I wrote that I would reduce my writing frequency: the reason, I explained, was that monthly publication did not allow me to explore the topics I wanted to discuss with the depth I wished to maintain.
In particular, I considered myself fortunate to be able to make this decision, because this website is not my job; and I pointed out that superficiality was the natural result of a technological environment that brings hyper-production to its extreme consequences; in short, that the nature of the medium (the internet) ultimately determines the characteristics of its products.
I therefore decided to write every three months, rather than every month, in order to give myself the possibility of addressing the topics I wrote about with greater depth. Six months have passed since then, and already I am no longer satisfied with this decision: for similar, although different, reasons.
In fact, I did what I wanted: I had more time to read, study, write, and rewrite. I certainly found what I was looking for, that is, I put myself in the condition of avoiding forced superficiality.
However, I encountered another problem: namely, that study is a journey without end. Every article read suggests three more, every answer brings with it other questions. When should one consider oneself satisfied? When should one stop in order to write, if at every moment there are so many unresolved issues before one's eyes, so many questions for which to seek an answer?
Usually, it is the environment that decides for us. When we study we have deadlines for exams or theses; and at work we have deliverables. This means that we have fixed, non-negotiable deadlines to respect: the result will not be optimal, but these conditions free us from the burden of choice.
But, once again, this is not my job. Here I am the one who decides when to stop and write; and in these months I discovered that I cannot find a good moment to do so; a moment, that is, which does not seem completely arbitrary to me, which places a full stop where instead there should be a comma.
In fact, the real problem is another one. I am certainly able to set myself a deadline, even an arbitrary one, and respect it. What holds me back is the awareness that an artifact produced in this way, in this case a text produced after three months of study, is necessarily provisional, temporary, necessarily obsolete at the very moment in which it is produced. While I write, I am aware of everything I do not know, and that I will know should I decide to continue studying in that direction.
This dissatisfaction has accompanied me throughout these six months. I reflected on it; I finally understood that, as already six months ago, the problem lies in the form and structure that governs not only this website, but all blogs, and the very idea of texts arranged in chronological sequence.
The problem is that writing means fixing an idea in time. Writing a blog, or in any case a corpus of texts ordered over time, means fixing a sequence of steps, each of which is conceptually immutable. Since each entry is fixed in time, the blog is clearly an unsuitable form for expressing content that instead grows and changes over time.
It is also an anachronistic form, a remnant of an analogical mindset, of a period in which the fate of a text was inseparable from that of the medium containing it: the only way to modify a written text in a physical book is to write a new book.
Today this is no longer the case. The internet has changed not only the way in which we produce and distribute texts, but also the way in which we conceive them: a digital document can be modified multiple times even after it has been written. In this technological environment, it is anachronistic to think of a text as something static and immutable, something fixed in time that can only grow when it is rewritten from scratch.
I therefore understood that my dissatisfaction comes from the fact that I am using the digital medium as if it were analog. I should instead accept its nature, and use it to its full potential in order to do what I intend to do.
I have therefore decided to keep a second section for "Notes", unstructured notes that will grow over time, separate from the "Blog", which instead consists of texts that are chronological by nature, whose ordering emerges naturally.
This idea is not new, of course: I am referring to Mike Caulfield's essay, *The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral*, which gives this page its title and which has since been taken up and discussed by other authors. In his text, Caulfield contrasts two different ways of organizing and producing knowledge.
A "garden" is a way of organizing knowledge in which contents are not conceived as finished objects, but as growing elements. A garden is not built once and for all: it is tended over time, modified, expanded, pruned. In the same way, a text can be seen not as the final point of a reflection, but as a node within a network of ideas that continues to evolve. Its form is not determined by the moment in which it is published, but by its ability to change together with what we know.
A "stream", on the contrary, organizes contents according to a temporal sequence. It is the model of the traditional blog, the feed, and the timeline: each element is born at a precise moment and is progressively pushed into the past by the publication of new elements. The stream tells a journey, records the passing of time, preserves a trace of what was thought or produced at a given moment.
Both structures have their own value, but they respond to different needs. The stream is natural when content is tied to the moment in which it is produced: a news article, a diary, a chronicle, the documentation of a journey. The garden, instead, is more suitable when content does not merely want to be published, but to continue growing: when the goal is not to record change, but to allow the content itself to change.
Ultimately, by exploring this question further, I realized that I had set up a stream, when in reality I wanted to grow a garden. I have therefore decided to realign the tools I use with what I want to do. I believe that, in order to express the full potential of a piece of content, one must carefully choose the medium through which to convey it; and that, conversely, understanding the media one uses allows one to express content to its full potential.
I will not delete this section; after all, this is not about recognizing that some media, and some formats, are better than others; but rather that they are more or less suited to what one wants to do.
Therefore, what remains for me to ask is: in the digital age, in which artifacts can be modified in place, what role remains for ordered sequences of artifacts fixed in time? What content is best suited to this format? Is it a purely anachronistic remnant of an analog era, and therefore something that can be discarded?
Legitimate questions; to which I will have time to reflect, updating my answer at the pace of my reflections, no longer limited by an anachronistic sense of material invariability.
Vale,
Davide