Jens Brockmeier (2000) argued that narrativizing is a process of understanding ourselves in time. Constructions of ourselves are “reflexive” and represent our own autobiographical memories, a “back and forth movement between past and present that relates to the future” (p. 54). Blogs present a unique case study for understanding the concept of time. They not only represent the linguistic and rhetorical moves in our writing that reveal our understanding of ourselves in time; we also have to contend with the material structure of blogs. The ways that they structure time for us.

Blogs enable reflexive construction of the self because their materiality maintains past and present attempts to represent ourselves. If we blog about our day-to-day lives, the exceptional and the mundane, the blog functions as a record of our lives, at least as we represent it. The blog is also a record of how we understand ourselves temporally because it prompts several choices in relation to time—how frequently we write; for how long we write; and the ways we represent how, why, and when things occurred. These choices point to how writers rely on constructions of time to achieve a reflexive sense of self.

Additionally, blogs enable this reflexive construction of the self because a notion of time is already built into the structure of blogs. The reverse-chronological order of posts acts as a framework or organizing principle (Brockmeier, 2000). By this I mean that the blog post I wrote today is first on the page, followed by the post I wrote last week, followed by the post I wrote the week before. Blogs privilege a linearity of the occurrence of writing, beginning with the most recent. In this sense, currency matters: the most recent post is the most relevant. Thus, this unique structure shapes the selves that people construct on blogs.

We might also wonder if blogs draw our attention to writing in the present. Brockmeier (2000) argued that our understanding of the present is always inflected by how we think of our past and the expectations we have for our future (p. 55). Narrating one’s life through blog writing draws upon a past that is necessarily structured by the technology of the blog itself.