Time on the web
Jill recently wrote a post on time and spatiality on the web. And then shortly after reading her post, I tripped over this: Uno Memento, a spoof on the movie Memento which I liked a lot. There are not a lot of films that have time itself has a major theme, but this is one of them and it made me wonder more in relation to Jill's wondering that the time of the web (writing) is unfamilar and perhaps belonging to the present?? It made me think of another disturbing film on time, the classic "Last Year in Marienbad", which I happend to write an essay on some years ago. In the preface to manuscript of the film, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robbe-Grillet writes that the time of the cinema is exactly the present. I cant remember if it was also him, that wrote or thought this, perhaps it is a conglemerate of a lot of stuff I have read but the argument of the now in film goes: temporality is not inherent in the image itself, like it is in language (we can _write_ in the past or present tense, imparfait or future perfect, but never express these tenses directly in the image), rather time in film arises from the combination of images, the editing - or the emergence of pictorial conventions which signals time (like the use of black/white to signal that this is going on in the past etc). When it comes to the temporality of the web, since much of what we absorb on the net is still verbal writing, the sense of time is still very much at close hand since language is. Yet, the webpage or website itself could be likened to an image - when we come across a page we havent seen before, we suppose that the time of it is "now" (i.e. it is recently updated and present current-day reality), until we, through the process of moving around it, discover whether it should be understood and interpreted in the past or present tense. Hence, using and following links could be likened to the process of editing for yourself; it is establishing the connection between links that makes us understand which time "tense" the nodes of the links belong too.
It is interesting how some sites refuse us to let us know when they are from, and how you will then go looking for a "last updated..." phrase somewhere to understand the site's timeliness correctly. What weblogs do is exactly to move this datestamp to the forefront, sparing us the worry (or the exitement) of wondering when something has been written, and hence how it should be understood (is this past or present?). So I would argue, I guess, that as a phenomena, weblogs are a symptom of our need to be situated in time, to understand the world around us in temporal, rather than spatial, terms.
When this is said, I remember Genette for saying somewhere in Narrative Discourse, that the only true temporality of the text is what we lend to it from the process of our reading (per memory, havent got the book here). Whether we read a book, watch a film, listen to a piece of music or read a weblog, we always do it in a moment of "now", which we can never escape.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:49