I like the rhythms of blogs. I like how things happen while I’m sleeping, how I become aware of other rhythms than my own in the blogs I read. Elouise usually blogs in her mornings, which are my afternoons. Meredith is a morning blogger too, but her morning writing happens as I fall asleep. I’m reading a book about women and time, wondering whether I’ll find anything I can use for my essay on timestamps in blogs, and there are many intriguing thoughts which may or may not be useful.

Michael Young (1988) has argued that “modern society has a linear bias to it; and that with this linear bias many natural rhythms have been replaced
by artificial ones, a rhythmic society replaced by a metronomic.” (Karen Davies, Women and Time: Weaving the Strands of Everyday LifeLund, Sweden: Grahns boktrykkeri, 1989, page 35)

Flylady‘s timed 15 minute missions, frequent (timed) emails and hundreds of thousands of appreciative, mostly female recipients suggest that linear and exact time may not be such an obviously anti-female proposition as Davies argues, though no doubt there’d be counter-arguments to this as well. In any case, I’m interested by the apparent opposition between the freeflowing connections, the rhythmic repetitions and the metronomically exact timestamps with which we adorn our weblogs.