Slow Blogging, Depth and Meaning – and Credit Where it is Due

Posted on | January 4, 2009 | 5 Comments

The notion of simultaneous discovery has an honourable place in scientific history and is usually explained by the evolutionary nature of scientific thinking – in other words, previous discoveries and prevailing circumstances set the conditions that enable the same or similar ideas and hypotheses to emerge at more or less the same time.

It’s quite a different story away from the sciences.

Thanks to fatboyke for the image.

I came to the conclusion over the past few days that maybe, just mabe, an idea that I called ’slow blogging’ might be of its time. I wrote a slightly whimsical post on New Year’s Eve that proposed the idea, and then, quite separately, Will Richardson offered almost the same idea just a couple of days later. I took my inspiration from pointers given by Leigh Blackall and Richard Sambrook, while Will took his encouragement from some careful thinking about his own blogging experiences.

As ever, though, nothing is new under the sun. Even as this idea emerged blinking into the daylight in one corner of the universe, I discovered that some had been pushing exactly the same idea for quite a while in another corner. Barbara Ganley and Chris Lott have been slow blogging for some time now, and I’m happy to accord them (and, no doubt, others too whom I have yet to identify) the credit for a good idea. The fact that others had thought of it before me is encouraging, since it means that the notion probably does have legs, so to speak. Chris, by the way, is the clever person who coined the phrase creepy treehouse (although I did find the ideal graphic to go with the term; I have my uses too, you know).

As Chris has written:

“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 led me to write things about blogging and other technologies that can be used for reflective practice…”

And as Barbara wrote in her original definition of the term, more than two years ago:

“…I try to look back as much as forward, to dig deep into the books that call to me from my bookshelves as I think about my teaching and my learning with social software and without. I think about my teachers as much as about my students. I try to stay aware of the context from which this blogging practice springs, and I try to consider the transitional spaces between old practices and new, old literacies and new, old treasures and new….”

If the medium is the message, perhaps blogging needs to recognise that a constantly frenetic pace is unsustainable, just as our planet faces up to the same message on a much more dangerous and urgent level. I think there is a sound rationale at the present time for taking blogging beyond those symbols of its own immaturity that we see in Technorati authority and Alexa ranking. Depth, meaning, reflection, contemplation of what has gone before, consideration of the real situation-as-is (instead of the various mythical bêtes noire, the straw men, that are just too easy to slay), musing on the medium and long term effects of current trains of thought: all of these and more might be thought of as slow blogging. I like to think that I’ve been doing at least a bit of that from day one of this blog, as have so many others that I read and follow. And it is nice to see Barbara, in that same original piece, note that accepting the notion of slow blogging does not mean we have to eschew entirely the occasional bit of fast blogging.

As George Siemens hints at in his own post on the subject, there is likely to be an inevitable process, already long started in my opinion, of the mainstreaming of blogging. While some will see this as a trend too far – preferring to see blogging retain its maverick, counter-cultural status – that would be a mistake, and one spawned by shallow thinking. If we look to the example of print technology, we can see that, while the technology has been part of the mainstream for centuries, mavericks, radicals and rebels are able to use the technology alongside conformists, conservatives and reactionaries of all kinds. So too will be the case with blogging.

Of course, there are some who just don’t like the idea of slow blogging at all – there will always be a place too for shallowness, silliness and fast blogging. And no bad thing either!

Technorati Tags: barbara ganley, chris lott, will richardson, george siemens, slow blogging

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