Newly Ancient

Printing press

We have built a culture of immediacy, which started long before the internet, but which has been stimulated and expanded within our digital realm. This culture of immediacy puts time above, and at the expense of, all else.

In no way is this a new trend: as Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, the pendulum of time has slowly swung towards the miniaturization of culture. When scribe was a profession, every word had great value. With the printing press, each character lost a whole lot of its worth when hundreds of siblings could be created concurrently. With innovations in technology (phone, tv, email, etc.), culture has been continually abbreviated.

This is not a bad thing. In many respects, it is actually good. Shorter and less valuable writing is often far more accessible on both economic and intellectual scales. There are thousands of great ideas in the world, many of which would be lost if they were presented in long and scholarly essays.

Unfortunately, the interweb culture has taken this concept (the abbreviation of culture) too far. Instead of taking good ideas and abbreviating them, we are making short ideas without respect to quality. This has led to an excess of dirt which makes finding the gems increasingly hard.

Here Comes Everybody is an excellent summary of social media by Clay Shirky.

Clay Shirky is a great believer in the doctrine of publish-then-filter, where the best will rise to the top. I remain skeptical, given what I know of people:

People are lazy.

Even when all it takes is the click of a button, filtering takes effort. Unfortunately, most people don’t want to exert that effort. Think about it: many people still watch commercials, even when a show is TiVoed.

The majority of Westerners now self-identify as consumers. Where we once had the working (producing) class, we now have the consuming class.¹ We are no longer, by nature, filterers or producers.

Of course, most blogs do have to engage in some form of filtering — it would be impractical to share everything. But then bloggers realize the very direct correlation between number of posts and income/popularity earned. We continue to tinker with the formula, trying to increase the percentage of incoming content converted to outgoing content. Unfortunately, it is easy to lose track of why we are sharing at all, in the effort to maximize the yield. Many blogs become the proverbial newspaper so filled with “advertising” that there are no longer any stories.

We, being the consumers we are, mostly ignore this: even when it takes effort to read a short post, it’s “easier” than unsubscribing entirely.

The response to this abbreviation of culture and thought is slow blogging, a movement which seeks to critically evaluate and think about ideas before publishing them.

Though I always respected the ideals of slow blogging, there has always been something about it which didn’t sit right with me: it sounds a lot like traditional media and academia, two things which I dislike even more than our culture of immediacy. The methodology of filter-then-publish is the same technique which traditional media has been using to control culture and society for ages. Additionally, many “slow bloggers” write in the style of academia: using a paragraph when a sentence would suffice.

When I took my hiatus from blogging this summer, this was one of the issues I struggled with: how to balance quality thinking and the seemingly implicit “schooliness” of slow blogging.² S.P. Greenlaw recently wrote a piece which brilliantly articulated those regrets I had been feeling:

My use of the internet is, it turns out, abuse. I have traded away my brooding study in exchange for an all encompassing buckshot of skim reading, estimation, and chiding. I have not got very much to say anymore, but very many topics on which I feel required to speak. In high school I would spend whatever money I had ordering books, and I would wile away an entire weekend dissecting Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Now I struggle to get through an abridged edition of Marx’s Capital, and I spend no more than fifteen minutes on it at a time before I go running for my RSS Reader to see if XKCD updated. In my youth I spent time writing epic (and awful, as most youthful writing is) novels on reams of loose leaf paper. These days I have to force myself to sit down and drag a short story to a conclusion, if I get that far.

In short, I let the desire for brevity and popularity come before my capacity for critical thought, because I saw the two as mutually exclusive. I wanted to think long about topics and delve deep, but I also wanted to keep my writing accessible.

A realization came to me from, ironically, a blog which touts the very techniques central to the culture of immediacy, in the form of a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Contemplative work can be the shortest work of all. It is a slow process to think through an idea, write it, then shorten it. This realization is supported by the Slow Blogging Manifesto:

Slow Blogging is speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. It is a willingness to let current events pass without comment. It is deliberate in its pace, breaking its unhurried stride for nothing short of true emergency. And perhaps not even then, for slow is not the speed of most emergencies, and places where beloved, reassuring speed rules the day will serve us best at those times.

In a world where words are practically free, the best way to make them valuable again is to use fewer of them. For the scribes, words were valuable because they were hard to produce. Now, words must be valuable because they are hard not to produce. The fewer words we use, the more thought that must be behind them.³

I embrace slow thinking and short blogging.⁴

Below: Pond Memories by antonychammond