Slow Blogging
I Googled that phrase — “slow blogging” — and got back a bunch of blog posts of the kind that you’ve probably read or written at some stage. It normally goes something like this:
Apologies for the slow blogging recently, real life got in the way and I’ve just had way too much work going on to be able to concentrate on writing recently. Stay tuned though, I’ve got plans for lots of interesting stuff soon!
Slowness is bad, these post say, but I’ll try to speed up again soon. This is funny, because they represent the exact opposite of what I was searching for, the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach: Slow Blogging.
Without the restrictions of regular media, we pajama-wearers can do whatever we want. For the most part, something is written when it’s ready to be written, and then it’s only as long as it needs to. Some people, like me, have very few things to say, so we say them infrequently.
Other have lots to say. I’ve had to unsubscribe from some good blogs and disconnect from some nice people on Twitter because I was becoming overloaded by their prolific pace. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate the huge effort that goes into maintaining this frequency, or even that quality necessarily suffers as a result of it. In fact, constantly churning stuff out almost certainly produces a net result of a much higher amount of quality content than sitting around waiting for a stray bolt of inspiration to hit. I’m just surprised that the whole Slow Movement thing hasn’t been more explicitly adopted by the more indolent among us. Or at least offered as an excuse.
Maybe I’m being a selfish online citizen by saying this. Is it alright for others to toil away in the mines daily, providing me with a continuous stream of content, while I happily recline in the hazy meadows of monthly posting? I don’t know. Maybe I’m also stating something that’s already completely obvious (sorry, I’ve got a monthly quota to meet). Anyway, thanks much to all you wonderful people who make the online content that I enjoy daily, and also to those who take their sweet time about it.
There was going to be a point to all of this.
Oh yes. Next week, Paula and I are traveling to New Zealand for a whole month of slowing down. I’m madly excited, but it means that I probably won’t be posting anything here until I get back (apparently many of the places we’ll be going to don’t have FM radio coverage, so I’m assuming that rules out wifi too). But stay tuned. I’ll have loads of interesting stuff from the trip to post when I’m back.
Previously on thoughtwax: Come home and make this place poor again. See also: Ze Frank on the merits of constantly producing stuff, scads of Slow Movement links on Metafilter, I Can Write 600 Words About Anything.