You may regard lists as innocuous, but their ubiquity signals something else: we think we use them to control chaos, yet it is they who control us

INTERMEDIA: Do you have childhood memories of being sent to the corner shop for the messages? In reality, you were sent "with" a message - a list of items. But by some strange twist of language and logic, you went "for" the messages - the shopping. It's almost as if the list - the actual message - were transparent or invisible.

Lists occupy a strange place in our narratives. As old as the Ten Commandments, they were a driving force in the "imperial archive" of the Victorian age, in the list-making of botanists and early "intelligence gatherers" and museums. Lists are one of the most pervasive forms in media spaces.

You are just one click away from lists as top news stories or best-sellers, personal Web pages that are just lists of favourite links, lists as jokes ("Those tell-tale signs that you might be working for a dotbomb"), lists as canonical "albums of the year", and lists as ways of structuring marginalia and nostalgia ("Signs you are a child of the 1980s"). These kinds of list offer insights into the zeitgeist - scraps of memory, of taste and of vain aspirations.

At another level, the concept of a list or running order on an album has been turned inside out by digital technology. A vinyl album would list the tracks in order on sides one and two; then the CD dispensed with the concept of sides. MP3 technology took this further again, with the ability to record your own tracks and shuttle between them, creating your own playlists, compilations and running orders.

List-making is supposed to empower us. It creates the illusion of order, of adding structure to our chaos and information overload, of personalising and taming it - whether domestic or professional, from shopping for the store cupboard to creating a personal soundtrack for your MP3 player.

Lists have varying statuses in these different social contexts. The business world, for example, doesn't refer to an ordinary, everyday "to do" list, preferring the more macho idea of a hierarchy of "action items". But the common drive is to bash this potential randomness into a clearly defined shape and structure.

Lists commonly involve self-improvement resolutions - much in evidence in Bridget Jones's Diary. Yet lists can also be highly expressive and emotional tools. Take this moment from Brian Friel's play Translations:

"Bun na hAbhann? Droim Dubh?

Poll na gCaorach. Lis Maol, Lis na nGall. Lis na nGradh.

Carraig an Phoill.

Carraig na Rí.

Loch na nEan.

Loch an Iubhair.

Machaire Buidhe.

Machaire Mor. Cnoc na Mona.

Cnoc na nGabhar.

Port.

Tor.

Lag."

Here the list works as a powerful narrative device. Friel uses the list of place names as a love song for Máire and Yolland, drawing out the importance of naming and shaping the local landscape, but also drawing the two closer together despite their linguistic differences.

And in more mundane matters, the credit-card bill, with its list of places, dates and figures, each neatly set out in columns, carries a curious charge in its repetition of a narrative itinerary.

Picture, say, a modern-day Leopold Bloom in a 21st-century Ulysses, recounting parts of his odyssey through his monthly credit-card statements.

In the early years of supermarket shopping, the advice to shoppers was to make a list and stick to it, to avoid overspending when caught up in the allure of the shelves and aisles. Curiously, though, researchers found it was the list shopper, not the listless, who purchased more.

In a neat reversal today, we often shop without a list, but that randomness is then rendered coherent by the narrative's closure. We're at the till, we take the receipt, a neatly printed list of our purchases, alongside other information, such as "You were served by Karen".

Then the list takes on a second life, swirling around as cross-referenced matrices of information in the supermarket's banks of computers. It becomes a digital bitstream of your consuming passions and shopping history, listing your regulars and favourites, and not forgetting your "loyalty" points. Somewhere along the line, we have become our own lists. The medium is the messages.

stephanie.mcbride@dcu.ie