Slow Blog

winter, 2009

I live pretty far away from where I grew up, and make at least one trip a year back to the family home. It’s in southwestern Ontario, a predominantly Mennonite farming community that’s not far from towns and cities. For me, these visits always involve spending time in a strange kind of identity interzone. Unconsciously or not, parents keep looking for the children they raised, and we keep trying to make them recognize us as the adults we’ve become. In these conditions, old patterns re-emerge with ease.

My old room is an office, but still smells right. My brother’s old room is the guest room. The house is the one I grew up in: the water pressure in the shower is still terrible, and the hallway still creaks in spots I’d learned to pad around in the dark of post-curfew hours. But it’s also changed in ways I wish it hadn’t: I keep opening the wrong drawer for the cutlery. The room that Dad added more than 10 years ago still feels out of place and temporary. I’m always a bit surprised by it, as if I thought it had only been dreamed.

We’re familiar strangers to each other, the house, my parents and me. And that’s the paradox of home, that we return to it looking for things that can’t be there, because they’re dependent on us never changing.

The other day, Kate Trgovac posted, among her regular links to useful and interesting resources for product managers and marketers, a sweet note to the Manifesto:

Todd Sieling, product manager extraordinaire – here in Vangroovy, has taken up his “slow blogging” project again. A response to the hyper-immediacy of Twitter. Worth a read and a ponder.

Reading that post on Kate’s blog is like having one of your favourite musicians stop mid-song to say they heard your demo tape and really liked it. Kate invoked Twitter as a sort of antithesis of Slow Blogging, and it’s not uncommon for Twitter to come up when talking about the culture of fast, which seems to teeter on a point between ethos and pathos in online behaviour and expectation.

Twitter, at its core a stream of 140-character posts that members use to ostensibly answer the question What are you doing?, does seem at first the worst kind of snack food for the brain. The most common objection I hear when describing it to a doubter is Why do I want to know when someone is going to the bathroom? or some variant. I’m not sure why this comes to people’s minds so often, but there must be multiple psychology and cultural criticism papers just waiting to be written to explain that reaction.

Despite those impressions, I think Twitter is a fantastic service, and I use it nearly every day. However, I do so in a fairly specific way, making the most of both the required and optional constraints that Twitter provides. These constraints are critical to not feeling overwhelmed by the speed and volume of information that Twitter can deliver. The remainder of this post is about that combination of constraints, and how I think they relate to Slow Blogging and blogs overall.

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