Notwithstanding the comparison, I think there’s a glaring difference between recency and temporality on the web. Recency doesn’t rule out context, whereas temporality certainly seems to. Temporality feeds into the death of the link, in the sense that a transient form like social media simply doesn’t provide much time for at most a single link. Recency doesn’t itself preclude the construction of a contextual web in the way that temporality does, so I’m not convinced that the blog broke the web. The problem with static homepages is that people are not static. They are fine as snapshots but mostly useless as ongoing thought. People lives their lives as processes, not as end-products, and even if someone were adding things to their homepage over time, the easiest way for an interested party to learn about it would be if the homepage were publishing additions to a feed—in which case the interested party would still be experiencing that person through a recency experience. People thinking out loud through chronological blog posts isn’t the problem; the problem is that poor-text, single-link social media formats disallow the contextual web.

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Author: Bix

The unsupported use case of a mediocre, autistic midlife in St. Johns, Oregon —now with added global pandemic. <a href="https://bix.blog/author/bix">
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