I've written 30 posts in 30 days for November Is National Blog Posting Month, although I haven't posted each day. At the same time I've been trying to post more often, a number of people have been posting about why it would be good to post less often. Leslie at The Clutter Museum brought this to my attention through 5 Things Teachers Could Learn From Slow Blogging. Leslie focuses on the uses of technology in higher education, but she links to a collection of articles on "Slow Blogging."
It seems a New York Times article by Sharon Otterman (November 21, 2008) triggered this month's discussion: Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace
...Ms. Ganley, 51, is part of a small, quirky movement called slow blogging. The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits. Slow food advocates...believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants--great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul.
Recursively enough, Slow Food (American style) has its own blog, The Slow Food USA Blog. I used to follow it regularly, because I'm interested in agriculture, food, cooking, gardening, old-fashioned skills, recipes, animal breeds, and crop varieties. However, I gradually lost interest in reading their musings on these topics. There's a line between being mindful of what you eat and where it came from and self-absorption, and they crossed it a little too often for my taste.
Unfortunately, as I made my way through the links Leslie provided, that same feeling began to creep over me. Maybe it was too many articles on the same introspective topic all at once. Perhaps if I approach these one at a time in a few days, I'll be able to get through them.
- Slow Blogging: Context, Transitions and Traditions (Back from Illinois, Part Two: Setting Up The Classroom Community) from Ganley's BGBlogging. The 2006 post that seems to have launched early discussion.
- Slow Blog Manifesto There's also a Slow Food Manifesto. I don't know which one came first.
- I Am a Slow Blog
- A "Slow Blog" Or Rather, "Bright Blog" Manifesto by David D. Perlmutter; Slow Blog: Part 2
- Why I Blog by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic.
I do believe it's valuable to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it, but I'm not sure how interesting it is for other people to read about it, at least in abstract terms. Heaven knows I love my tomatoes, and I slap photos, recipe, and how-to's on my blog expecting that others may enjoy or learn. The tomatoes are wonderfully concrete, and much more interesting than my second-hand analysis of the evils of agribusiness.
Aw shucks. I've gone and blogged about blogging again.
4 comments:
See any tigers today?
I know exactly what you mean about reading too much on a topic at once. I'm frequently guilty of having 20 browser tabs open at once on a given topic. But old academic research habits die hard. . .
No, Rick, the poor old tiger didn't make it too far from home. The same guy lost an Asian brown bear a few years ago, which was never found. There is a game farm down our way that's lost a kangaroo, some white European deer. One morning a few years ago, a big elk-like critter turned up in the yard here, but we never found out what it was.
Hey, Leslie, thanks for your interesting article. I'll have to go back in a day or so and re-read some of those essays, to see whether I still object to the tone of "slow bloggers" or whether it was topic overload.
I alternate between slow and fast blogging. Occasionally I just have to take a week or two off, sometimes because of energy and attention constraints and other times because I need to let ideas incubate.
Escaped animals? We have some wild emus roaming the woods around here, and they seem to be able to overwinter. I don't know if they can manage to reproduce.
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