Stream of Consciousness vs Well Written Articles

So this word “stream of consciousness” is being thrown around a lot these days. What exactly does it denote? It means rambling. Rambling of thoughts and words. Something that was far too common has come out more in the open with the advent of internet and the ease with which people write, comment, tweet, mainly tweet, publish, post, blog and what not. Most people have some random thoughts and ideas about various things that is going on as well as on various topics. Couple of likes and tweets later more and more they start dwelling into a topic. They discuss context. They write the various points and abstracts related to a topic. The readers are a diverse bunch with some experts, some internet experts, some having read about the topic (mostly in wikipedia) to powerful crowd driven forums such as Reddit, to naive users and so on. All the more, it points to building up an audience. But towards what?

There in lies the dilemma of this stream. Many authors write in various frames of mind and towards various audiences. Mostly self. But if you are a professional blogger then towards a target audience. Your target audience is made of select individuals who will all fit towards some range of personalities. Anyone outside that range will see your material as a stream of consciousness. To an expert, no matter how well written your article is, it might come across as simple. To a naive user, it might come across as a bit sophisticated. Either way, it is a difficult topic for the authors.

Now what exactly is a blog or an article? What is the end purpose of it? I would argue that the main goal is self improvement first. On any topic, you need to have your own thoughts formed first. Thoughts are notoriously unorganized at first and pretty ugly and blind at times. As you write drafts after drafts, like a painting, it starts removing the un-important parts by the side and focuses on the abstract and important parts with clarity. Important for whom? Now is where many authors branch out their content as geared towards Novice, middle users and advanced users. Notice how the content is graduating from stream state to draft state to publish state ? Essentially it is just a state. There is nothing wrong with having articles in stream state. In fact, many finance blogs have this stream state mentality mirroring the state of the finance which is in general quite unclean and streamy. Contrast to that a medical journal which has to be very ordered and clean. So every thing depends on a context. A stream of cons article is going to be hard to read but shows the points that the author has thought thru which helps in conversation and form your own opinion in higher state. A well ordered article by contrast, often times, tries to make a point ( author’s point ) and hence leaves some doubt in the mind of the reader that whether all possibilities have been covered.

Since I am not a professional blogger who is employed by a company to write neat articles with images in a Content management system to back it all, I am going to have articles which are heart felt, organized, neat, stream of consciousness and a mix of each of these. There are often some topics where I have a very cut and dry opinion and will likely form a small abstract or a one pager but more often that not, I look at blogging as an activity of self improvements along with others and commentors and form a view on a topic. For instance, I blogged on finance and investing and now have a nuanced view of how to organize it. A model. A simple algorithm that I follow and that has enabled me to counter the current narrative as well as dissolve any new theories in the concentrated form of knowledge that I have in that matter. It is the same thing with health or nutrition or working out or travel or credit cards or many aspects of relationships or spirituality to other things that a human gradually explores as he grows up in this world and spends more time in it. I do not believe in just a nice, elegant, clean and hygenic article — that could be an end point or finale of some ideas but more often than not to get there, the road is often rocky. And why not take others for the ride along with you — is not that the whole point of internet and open communication ?