Lists are just writing devices. There are lots of other writing devices, and they all serve the same purpose: as scaffolding for building up ideas and communicating effectively. Some of the popular ones:
* Socratic dialog (ie, the openings of G.E.B. chapters)
* Anthopomorphism (ie, Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme)
* F.A.Q.
* Narrative (ie, Ivan Krstic's Porsche story --- which, again, who knew Ivan had that in him? Wow!)
And my point is just, all these devices can be abused, and all of them can serve a purpose. There's no profound reason Top-N is popular; the reason it's there is straightforward: every "how to have a popular blog" post lists it as a key technique for engaging A.D.D. Internet readers.
1. It puts everything in perspective. After all, essay is just another one of several devices to convey a point through writing.
2. He clearly states that any one of these devices can be abused. Surely anyone can write a crappy and spam-filled essay with a catchy title just as they can do so with a list.
3. Clearly many people surfing the Internet do have A.D.D. Perhaps the cause is the Internet itself but it doesn't matter, the end result is the same - namely, reading material for A.D.D. Internet users is in high demand.
As PG points out, lists are an especially low-risk literary device.
Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for. It can also tend to be long-winded and indirect, like real dialogue.
Extended metaphors, like cantilevered structures, will eventually break. Usually sooner rather than later. When I started writing the zoo comment, I had no idea the damn thing was going to sustain itself across a whole essay; I figured it would reach a length of two sentences and then need to be edited down to one or zero, which is the fate of most newborn metaphors.
Anthropomorphism is another form of extended metaphor, except that it is especially likely to overreach badly. You can end up making big logical mistakes, because the human brain is very forgiving of anything that lets it exercise its built-in machinery for understanding humans. We love that. So history is rife with epic-level anthrocentric fallacies that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. (How can the Earth be so much older than humans? How can life have been designed, if not by an independent consciousness that likes to build things? Of course the sun orbits us, and not the other way around!)
The typical FAQ is terribly disorganized and unbalanced, even more so than the list. (To achieve a FAQ that is actually readable, you must carefully compose your FAQ. Do not make the natural mistake of thinking that throwing all your FAQs into a pile will produce a readable FAQ. ;)
And, while narratives work well, only a tiny percentage of anecdotes are of any use as entertainment:
>Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for.
A great negative case study for this is Jane Jacobs' second-last book, The Nature of Economies, which was written as a socratic dialogue among, regrettably, a bunch of insufferable hip urban New Yorkers. The ideas she expresses are first-rate (as usual), but the presentation borders on the unreadable.
* Socratic dialog (ie, the openings of G.E.B. chapters)
* Extended metaphor (ie, mechanical_fish's zoo comment)
* Anthopomorphism (ie, Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme)
* F.A.Q.
* Narrative (ie, Ivan Krstic's Porsche story --- which, again, who knew Ivan had that in him? Wow!)
And my point is just, all these devices can be abused, and all of them can serve a purpose. There's no profound reason Top-N is popular; the reason it's there is straightforward: every "how to have a popular blog" post lists it as a key technique for engaging A.D.D. Internet readers.