Slow Blogging is in the air. And even slower blogging. I don’t know all the details of the Slow Blogging movement, nor have I had the pleasure of meeting Barbara Ganley (who has been championing the concept) to talk about it. But I’m quite aware of the slow blogging idea… not just from Barbara’s blog entries, but from serendipitously stumbling across other people who had independently developed similar ideas. I’ve had similar– though less fully explored– thoughts about blogs and blogging for some time, particularly after coming under the influence of a book I’ve since recommended to many people, Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow .
Writing Practice
Barbara Ganley is (was?) an English teacher so it stands to reason that her description of slow blogging involve principles familiar to those who will admit to being writers (even if only to themselves in the middle of long nights when no one is listening). Slow blogging makes sense to me because it’s about practice in both the traditional and meditative senses of the term. It’s about going deep and connecting, but maintaining a powerful mental stillness in which we can really hear the world around us: the whispers, the wind, and the sound of our own thinking. It involves the kind of principles that have lead me to write things about blogging and other technologies that can be used for reflective practice like:
There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind).
And I like that slow blogging is an explicit antidote to the subtle, pervasive technological determinism that lurks beneath the surface of many geeky conversations focusing on speed, ease, shortening of attention and shrinking of content. I don’t doubt the reality of these points… I just want to make sure we don’t forget that these characteristics are driven by our behavior, not the tools we use, which remain inert whether we sleepwalk through their use or not. As I put it in this blog before:
I strive (and fail often, but continue trying) to be network neutral. I support the intellectual and expressive capabilities that modern networks provide… the tools– no matter how shiny, sophisticated and new or old, dusty primitive– are just a means to the multiplicity of ends. Diigo or del.icio.us, Mac or PC, Blogger or Wordpress, Twitter or Tumblr… the specific choices of applications and services is of limited interest.
At the same time, I recognize that specifics regarding particular tools are critical at certain stages– particularly those who are just beginning to pursue the craft of network building and participation– in the same way that rather than getting lost in the studio a beginning painter can benefit from being told “use that brush in this way to achieve that effect.” But I do get tired of talking about them.
The most important thing for the beginning painter is to get painting. To do that they need brush (or palette knife, sponge, stick) in hand. All the study in the world won’t produce a painting by itself, so figuring out the tools is necessary. But the end result is mostly interesting without any knowledge of the brand of paint, the weight of the canvas, or even the particular tools used to transfer paint from the palette.
I can’t help but get behind slow blogging as an approach in which one can commit a pre-meditated act of art, with intention and curiosity aforethought. Making art is A Good Thing, and blogging can and should sometimes be a means to that end regardless of its many other affordances.
Mindful Wandering
In 2002 I became interested in what Jorn Barger was calling the Content Centered Web and his idea of The Necessary Web. What intrigued me were the characteristics I could see of this idea in Barger’s Joyce pages: a deep reluctance to being overly designed (or designed at all in the graphical sense) coupled with an insistence on creating something wide and deep. Barger’s pages sprawled and followed up on tangential connections as well as direct references. They looked much like the thoughts that could be found there, growing and shrinking, wholly free of the neat confines of contemporary concept maps. Where mind-maps subdue the sprawl, Jorn’s web embraced and embodied it… but without giving into the temptation to wield the drive-by links and the elliptic, self-directed references that characterized many sites (and now are the hallmark of many smart blog entries).
At the same time I was starting to get serious about the practice of meditation. In exploring the the world of meditation beyond traditional Zazen I learned of "active" meditative practices by which many tasks could be transformed from pursuits to paths of their own, from washing dishes (wash your bowl!) to walking meditation (walk with nature, not through it). The idea being to practice mindfulness and attention through mindful wandering.
What is the process of creating a slow blog entry (or a content-centric web meander) if not an opportunity for reflection and practice and, ultimately, mindful wandering? If we listen to our thinking, following the connections as they come and searching for the inclusions that feel right– and craft our words with intent– we are engaged in the best kind of creative activity.
My Life as a Slow Blog or Fear Itself
In my "formal" creative writing, whether ultimately intended for publication or destined to be seen only by those ravaging my journals for fire starter in some post-apocalyptic future, I feel free to create without that extra layer of fear of exposure and oeuvre. I have scores of journals filled with poems and essays and fragments, artifacts of my thinking and thinking about that thinking, with snippets of language I’ve liked, notes on reading, life strategies and lists… in an obsessive-but-not-quite-graphomanic attempt to effect the kind of practice I see encapsulated in slow blogging.
In my own blogging I’ve tried to balance the link sharing and easy, off-the-cuff posts with longer (some would say long-winded), personal, detailed posts in the same vein as– if not mimicking– bloggers I admire. I try to write the kind of posts that I like to read: substantial, open-ended pieces that are at least as hopeful of asking the right questions as answering them. I consider such entries here and in Cosmopoetica to be a kind of slow blogging, though being a word guy through and through I have yet to explore the visual and multimedia capabilities beyond their use as artifacts to share or that inspire my thinking.
[image by maile&justin]
The ease of publishing with a blog doesn’t lull me into complacency, it allows me to grow complacent. And that’s not the worst of it! Worse still is the paradox that while I’m tempted with the blog into writing with less attention and intention, the fear that comes with the necessary risk of sharing should be, but isn’t, diminished. Even the most trivial contribution– each entry being a pointillist dot in a large-scale representation of ourselves– inspires fear, not to mention the significant words that erupt from us, and happen to us, when we take risks and exchange trust for trust and even love for love.
One of my favorite authors remarked in an interview (that I cannot find online) his/our fear, thanks to the prevalence of the simple ‘ironic voice’, of:
"talking straight about anything that means anything that might sound cliche, might sound uncool, might sound unhip. [...] If the greatest sin in the past was obscenity or shock, the greatest sin now is appearing naive or old-fashioned, so somebody can give you that extra-cool smile and devastate you with that one extraordinarily crafted line that puts a hole in your pretentious balloon."
When we feel chastened and hesitant to admit our simple guilty pleasures and least personal unpopular views, what becomes of grappling with the essential questions? Of going deep into our experiences to convey how and what they mean to us? Of opening ourselves up enough to encompass conflict, diversity, and change? Because at some point, that’s what I feel a hungry need to do. Another quote from the same author, this time from a story:
"Please don’t tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die."
Slow blogging is mindful wandering is meditative reflection is an attempt to face the fear, to take a stab at the heart, take responsibility and risk, and in the process create a gift of immense value to others, a manifestation of our particular truth.
Great post, and I read it slowly (a rare occurrence). I paid particular attention to your questioning note, “When we feel chastened and hesitant to admit our simple guilty pleasures and least personal unpopular views, what becomes of grappling with the essential questions?”
For most blogs the norm is to leave comments open, but as DFW and you both suggest, at the risk of someone putting “a hole in your pretentious balloon”. We are all pretentious in some ways, and we all love our differently colored balloons. This doesn’t indict us; it proves us human. But it does still expose us. Some of that will be supportive, some of it will be negative, whether that’s through tough and keen reasoning of well-informed individuals, or the simple derision of crackpots. And though we want an audience do we write because we want the visible attention of the audience? As an audience do we read because we want the visible attention of participating? How important are either of those to the act of writing/thinking/blogging?
I recognize the “slow” picture at the top from a walk through a neighborhood near downtown.
[...] (Via George Seimens @ elearnspace > Chris Lott @ Ruminate.) [...]
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Thanks Chris,
This is a fine post. I’m glad to have taken the time to take a look at your blog, and to have learned about slow blogging.
In friendship
Adrian
This speaks to me. I find it impossible to slow my reading and writing of blogs, so much so that I’m going to have to avoid the Internet as a tool to interact with others. That is a pity because I see such a wealth of activity out there. But to stay true to myself and to develop my own presence and world vision I really must close myself off or else be very, very selective. And ’slow’ it goes without saying. I doubt I can do that.
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Links after links on ’slow blogging’ I came to your blog and I’m glad I’ve made this discovery. Will be exploring more.
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