Weekend Ponderable: Two slows
DLB has something for you to ponder this weekend: What revelations are you already stumbling towards?
Nick pointed me yesterday to this blog post, by Chris Lott. It is a sort of manifesto (although apparently not the first) for what seems to be an emerging movement: slow blogging.
Slow blogging, on the concept drawn by Lott and his influences, means spending more time on posts, taking care to not distribute our thoughts half-baked. From the Slow Blogging Manifesto: "Slow Blogging does not write thoughts onto the ethereal and eternal parchment before they provide an enduring worth in the shape of our ideas over time."
I’d like to counter-propose that while this conception is motivated by the right kind of concern, it misses what’s really good about blogging in the first place. I want to do this because I am deeply in agreement that blogging is an undersold platform for doing a serious kind of writing work.
The slow-blogging advocates are correct that the blog culture is often unthoughtful, and that a likely culprit for this is a supposed need to deliver an incessant stream of interesting content. The immediate and obvious (albeit unreflective) solution is to just "go lowest common denominator," and pound out aggregate blog posts until your fingers bleed. I agree with the slow-bloggers that this is non-optimal.
However, I find it overly reactionary that the correct response to this observation would be to write blog posts more like a magazine articles. The right solution here, I think, has to both take on board the legitimate criticisms of the slow bloggers and still allow itself to leverage the power of the blogging medium.
So I would suggest, as opposed to the proposed "magazine slow," something more like an interest-based (or "geological") model of blogging, where deep ideas are allowed to accrete over time from an ongoing public conversation in blog posts. The requirement for a "slow blog" would not be that each post is a criticism-worthy piece unto itself, but rather that each post contributes to an emergent argument. I would suggest that taking such a tack manages to handle both the depth and breadth concerns inherent to good blogging practice handily.*
* On an interesting side note, this is exactly what tag cloud navigation tracks. As themes emerge, they become more and more salient navigational elements.
Tongue firmly in cheek, I’d like call this kind of emergence-model slow-blogging slogging: Slogging means that by simply continuing to make small steps forward, you’ll eventually get somewhere.
But of course, the key is taking the time to notice what themes are emerging from your posts. So, as you tune up last year’s weather-stripping on your windows this weekend, why not spend some time pondering what your blog posts are already trying to tell you?
Comments on this post
1.
Sounds like a fine idea to me and not one that needs to be in opposition to my post. It’s not a zero-sum game after all!
My idea of slow blogging, which morphs from time to time, is not exactly the same as Barbara Ganley’s or various others. I think we all, including you, share at least one goal: to persuade people to pay attention and expand the ways that blog writing is considered.
The “accretion” model is interesting and not without precedent! Looking at a blog– or a slice of a blog– and considering it as a whole is often the concern of “digital identity” and other such discussions, but I think it is a consideration worthy of creative efforts as well.
But even in this there are many paths… it sounds like you are essentially advocating for a model of emergence– pay attention to what is happening on a larger scale while intuitively creating on the smaller where I would consider adopting the same approach but putting more emphasis on intentionality w/r/t the overall direction, because I have a particular desire to see more *attention* paid and it would be easier (for me, at least) to take the idea you have outlined above and essentially pay little or no attention at all, grafting a kind of synthetic understanding of whatever whole emerged. That’s not a bad thing, just not my thing. I think I did some form of that kind of retrospective assignment for too long.
Needless to say, I enjoyed your comment and appreciate it. I might disagree that there is “a” right way or an opposition to be created (after all, I like to read– and find it worth writing– blog entries in other modes!), but your post is a contribution toward making blogging a potentially richer experience. How can that be bad?
Sorry to ramble. Is this slow commenting? Comment slogging? Clogging? :)
2.
Hey Chris,
Fair points all, and of course there is room enough in the world for all kinds of blogs. Certainly the accretion idea is underwritten by my personal experience: I find that more often than not my best ideas emerge in conversation or in "freewriting," and that polishing them is the more plodding, solitary part of the endeavor. Whereas writing beholden to the latter seems to me the hallmark of traditional publishing, one of the things I find particularly nifty about blogs is that their commonest mode seems to involve exposing the former.
I guess for my money, blogs are interesting and useful tools because they can teach us stuff about how we think, rather than just presenting the polished fascade. (Hence, for example, I get to talk to you about what it is that blogs are doing without having spent several hours painstakingly developing my position - I get to "think out loud" so to speak.) Naturally, of course, this isn’t the only way to do it, it’s just the way that’s most harmonious with whatever it is I think makes blogs so bloggy.
That said, you are correct to that we both want to advocate a mindful engagement with self-published content. Regardless of from whence the "big idea" comes (and indeed, even if it is entirely synthetic) the important thing - as you note - is that we have the presence of mind to pick it out and course-correct accordingly when it does.
Thanks for the great comment, and the food for thought.
3.
Slogging vs. blogging? Do we really live in an either/or world? Personally, I like to bounce back and forth between microposts and more involved ones. I have to admit that I haven’t wrote anything that involved for a while, but I like the way content is shaped by availability - there is an honesty to that.
Personal experience aside, I do like this movement & idea because I think for many people out there (especially in niche blogging) it is more about “getting it out there first” more often than “wrapping said content in some poignant commentary”.
4.
Greg - Of course you are right that we don’t live in an either/or world. I certainly wasn’t trying to postulate some deep ontological rightness about the model I am talking about, but rather to just feel around for what I think is good and useful about blogs in particular, and how we might be able to use that in service of developing our ideas (say, strategic rightness).
We also hop between longish and shortish posts here, and I guess what I meant to suggest in the above was that even those shortish ones could, properly construed, be in service of a some larger idea.
And yes, I definitely like the slow-blogging idea too, especially in spirit. Thanks for jumping into this discussion. I’m particularly glad to get the opinions of bloggers like yourself and Chris, both of whose blogs are good examples of the kind of thoughtful blogging we all want to advocate.
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