May 02, 2005

Each morning I get up, eat slabs of meat with my fingers, and contemplate killing this blog. The writing has grown stagnant, and the narrative is dwindling into incoherence. I feel that I’ve run out of ideas — I can only post my cock online so many times before it stops being funny (even to me). Most blogs reach a point where they just suck.

“So how do I write things that don’t suck?” I asked myself, finishing my breakfast.

In his article in the New York Times, Steven Johnson came up with a plausible answer: multithreading. Steven wasn’t writing about blogs but about television; he argued quite forcefully that prime time television has gotten a lot more complex over the last 50 years. A typical show on network television intertwines many narrative threads and distinct characters to push forward a story. This complexity was unthinkable in the 1950’s where TV shows were linear as not to confuse the audience. Modern television embraces confusion, Steven argues, and is not afraid to place cognitive demands on the audience. Instead of delivering meaning, TV expects viewers to discover connections.

When it comes to blogs, the idea of multithreading is especially relevant because on blogs narration is never self-contained. Every single piece of information connects with other pieces of information; narratives often span not just across a single blog, but across multiple sites. The very structure of hypertext encourages the interweaving of stories, and also makes it easy for readers to delve into this complexity.

Words intermingle in beautiful ways.

But so far I’ve been trying to simplify this complexity. I approach every entry as a self-contained narration, a distinct unit of information, even though I’m deeply aware that each story connects on many levels with many other stories. Threads follow each other viciously. My hesitation to embrace complexity has ultimately made the writing itself stale and unimaginative. I want each story to connect with what went before and the discourses that surround it, but I haven’t yet found a good way of doing so.

So, let’s find ways to multithread narratives, or give up writing altogether.