Clarifications (?) on “Slow Blogging” and “Fast Reading”
Friday, 12 December 2008 Clay Burell 
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(A response to Morgante Pell’s “Slow Blogging in Fast Times.”)
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
–Ben Hecht
Nice post. I’m sympathetic to the thrust, but would argue it’s not the length of the post that measures the quality of the writing, but the length of each idea within that post.
I’m thankful for almost every long sentence and long novel from our Joyces and Faulkners and Barths, and would never complain over their expansiveness. They teach us that “really long” can still be “not too long, but precisely long enough.” And that’s always the way it’s been with real writing. There’s nothing new here.
In this connection, the issue of slow blogging can easily become an object of abuse itself (and no accusations that that’s happening here). I’d argue we need to be careful to keep a high priority on regular, daily writing, and not pooh-pooh a high word count as the goal for our daily quota. That’s what real writers do. (“Inspiration is a lazy bitch. She won’t come to you. You have to chase her down every day.” – a paraphrase of something I read somewhere and hold dear, sexist language and all.)
So length, to repeat, is not the problem. The perennial teacher-answer to the perennial student-question – “How long does it have to be?” – “Not too short and not too long: just long enough to meet the demands of the assignment” – holds true for a writer’s self-assignments too.
It’s those “self-assignments” that bring us closer to any “problem” raised by the “slow blogging” camp. And to me, it’s only a problem for people who want to be writers instead of journalists.
There’s a place for them both, obviously. Fragmented reactions to the events of the day are the rightful domain of journalism, and many bloggers have placed their stakes in that territory. There’s nothing wrong with that. There could even be something very right with it, for blogger-journalists who choose to specialize in a narrow range of one or two topics – film, publishing, politics, whatever. Such daily engagement would not produce a “dumber” person at all, I would argue; on the contrary, it would grow into an “expertise” over time, a “deep learning” as a result of the daily reading-reflecting-writing cycle such “fast blogging” follows. (In many cases, it’s hard to deny this would also lead to improved writing skills, since these daily push-ups in sentence construction, organization, voice, and all the rest would serve as workouts to build the writing muscles.)
Where “fast blogging” goes wrong, then, is with that other writer: the one who wants something less daily, and more timeless. (Not to be prissy, but the French “belles-lettrist” is a label that comes to mind for this type of writer. Other labels such as “essayist,” “novelist,” “fiction-writer,” “non-fiction writer,” “philosopher,” “theorist,” and “poet” belong in this set too.)
For this writer, “fast blogging” is anathema. Not in length, mind you, but in subject matter. This writer is the one who should embrace “slow blogging,” it seems to me. And the surprise comes in that such an embrace demands decisions, above all, about what to read. And here’s where we might talk about “fast reading” – my term for S.P. Greenlaw’s mention of his RSS Reader addiction – as the real problem, not “fast blogging.”
Because it’s the “fast reading” that seduces us into fragmentation, immediacy, the second-hand instead of the hour-hand or, better, the historical timeline spanning centuries. Our writing reflects our ideas, and our ideas come to a large degree from the reading with which we occupy our minds. If we’re reading blogs daily, our minds and ideas are not only occupied by, but also sound like, “Boing Boing.” (Couldn’t resist.)
So for the writer aiming at timelessness, maybe the enemy is not the daily “fast blogging.” Maybe it’s the daily “fast reading”: the Google Reader, the Stumbling Upon, the one-inch “Digging” and consumption of the latest hi-calorie Delicious thing.
But let’s be fair. These “filtered” publishings we daily (hourly, secondly) consume are often of high quality and high value. The problem comes in the fact that, taken together, they are disjointed, fragmentary, somewhat random, and almost always “contemporaneous” and “immediate” – connected to the day or the year, but by no means the longer river of time. And that makes our thoughts more like mayflies flitting on that river than old growths towering beside it. Not much timelessness there.
So maybe the answer for “slow bloggers” isn’t the imperative to write daily online; maybe it’s to read daily - offline.
And yes, that means books.
- Must. Read: 21-year-old on Slow Blogging
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No. 1 — December 12th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
“And yes, that means books.”
Ah, but what if they are e-books? Gotcha.
But seriously. Since taking the time to think about things that I post, I find myself reading more. It’s delightful. Part of the reason is that because I am chasing down ideas, some of them old ones that have been stewing in the back of my mind for some time, I get to wonder where I heard that before or what so-and-so thinks on the subject. So, writing in a measured way has led me to think in a measured way, which has forced me to really read again. The fact that I’m already feeling better about the whole thing so soon is remarkable.
Oh, and I took Boing Boing off my google reader account a few days ago. They were updating too much for me to deal with, and I had to fight the compulsion to click to every single new article Doctorow posts about DRM. Rehab is tough, man.
spgreenlaws last blog post..A Frost poem would be cliché, wouldn’t it?
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 12th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
S.P.,
I know you were kidding (mostly) about e-books, but they do open the door to that ADD/Obsessive-compulsive urge to check the reader/blog/news/Twitter etc. That’s why “off-line” seemed key.
As Will says in the next comment, and as I didn’t say well enough, it’s no “either/or,” but a question of balance. History has the accelerator to the floor, so I can’t not do online reading. But it also has a back-story to serve as context and deeper well, so I can’t – or shouldn’t – neglect the more focused study of books. Yet I do exactly that.
And I can’t even bring myself to unsubscribe to Boing Boing.
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No. 2 — December 12th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Hey Clay,
In J school, my Principles of Reporting prof handed back my first article with four words at the top: “Cut it in half.” When I did the revision, he handed it back with five words at the top: “Cut it in half, again.” I got the point.
What I love about my favorite essayists, Donald Murray, Anna Quindlen and others, is their ability to squeeze out the most meaning from every word. And I know that was the product not just of vision but re-vision, and then more re-vision. I loved the way Donald Murray used to write and reflect on his process, the way he positioned the reader in the task, the way he heard his reader hear his sentences. I learned much from the way he made his process transparent, and I wish he was alive today to be blogging about it.
I think that is the good and bad of fast writing/blogging. We don’t take the time to revise, to re-vision a post in the same way. Yet, I feel like my ability to revise as I write has found new heights simply by doing it over and over and over for seven years in these online spaces, and that that revise-as-you-go posture doesn’t necessarily mean less quality or less depth. In fact, I think on balance, I might trade all that depth for the scope and scale of what I can connect to now. It’s like for me, deep reading comes in the synthesis of ideas from many disparate parts. It’s like I’ve trained my brain to make those connections, to compose it’s own compilations and collections, to do the stuff that authors of books used to do for me. To make an attempt, at least, of creating its own “longer river of time.” And I can go deep into the pools when I desire to do so. (Let me show you the marked up pages of my current book in hand.) But I can also find comfort in the rapids.
This isn’t (I don’t think) a defense of fast reading or fast blogging as much as it is a defense of this reality of information and an acquiescence to the reality of “continuous partial attention” or “ambient awareness” or what ever the cool description of the month is. As I think you suggest, both slow/fast reading/blogging have value. The rub is how do we get the most from both at the same time, and, in turn, how do we help our kids do that as well.
PS…How ironic to have a countdown clock for revision once a comment is published. So much for slow commenting. ;0)
Will Richardsons last blog post..The Ultimate Disruption for Schools
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 12th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Will, I hear you on the “revise-as-you-go” piece. That’s what I was trying to get at with the daily writing work-out that blogging gives us.
An aspect of this I didn’t mention, and that really comes out when you picture you and me, both well over 40, and S.P. (21) and Morgante (16?), is age. We immigrants grew up with books to give us our big picture of history and all the details on its canvas. That was a long, sustained process of construction. For me, at least, books were key in that. (Hm. Teaching was even more key.)
Would I have such a coherent big picture if I were a native, reading websites in my youth more than I read books? I can’t know. But I wonder what Morgante and S.P. and other youths would say.
How do you piece together the “great conversation” of ideas over time, in grandest liberal arts fashion, classic-to-classic and idea-to-idea (what Nietzsche calls the “conversations from peak to peak through the centuries,” to roughly paraphrase), without slowing down, reading those primary and secondary sources, and weaving them into coherence over years of youth – if you don’t read books? Can you do that online?
I mean, I know Project Gutenberg and such are there, but those old public domain translations generally fail to speak to us, especially the young, in voices and styles we’re comfortable with. That’s what struck me about S.P.’s post, particularly. You could hear his conscience telling him his time at 21 was better spent reading Kropotkin and Marx, without other readings open on other Firefox tabs doing the siren bit when he’s trying to concentrate on keeping his course.
“How to help our kids do that as well” indeed.
But to end this, you’re clearly right to say that it’s not either/or. It’s more how much of each – which I’m just wondering doesn’t change depending, among other things, on age.
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No. 3 — December 13th, 2008 at 4:26 am
In short, I completely agree: the ideal intellectual development involves a mix of slow and fast reading/blogging.
At 15, I definitely don’t have the same historical perspective as any of you. I haven’t even made a dent in reading the classics, and everything has always seemed to be fast.
Luckily, I have had great teachers over the years who encouraged me to explore the classics—offline. I make time for both – though most of the day is spent online, I do some slow reading everyday.
However, I do think there are major benefits to fast reading. Primarily, it is far more accessible than slow reading. While Clay, Will, and I might voluntarily read the classics in our free time, most students won’t. However, there are plenty of students willing to subscribe to a few blogs which interest them. In terms of development of literary enthusaism, fast reading can be far more effective than slow, dead-paper reading.
As you said, there are places for both slow and fast bloggers. Fast bloggers are, in every sense of the word, journalists. Fast blog is perfect for covering anything like politics, which moves fast. The problem I see is when people attempt to approach topics more appropriate for slower thinking with a fast blogging attitude. A sad example of this I see is the educational discourse: education really doesn’t move so fast that it is important that responses be immediate. Educational pedagogy and theory evolves slowly, not with the quick shifts of politics.
There is no question that fast blogging can make you a better writer over time, but I believe a healthy dose of self-reflection is required to enjoy maximum improvement. Otherwise, it is easy to get stuck in the same tired and poor style.
Clay, I absolutely agree that length isn’t the critical factor. But length:ideas is. The greats actually all have very good length to idea ratios, but schools tend to just focus on forcing increased length rather than depth of ideas.
You must have had different teachers than me, since many of mine will tell me 3 pages, even when I could easily fit the critical ideas in 1.
P.S. I once subscribed to Boing Boing, but quickly unsubscribed due to the deluge of pointlessness. On the other end of the spectrum, I long ago unsubscribed from bgblogging, finding the massive word counts too high for the few ideas.
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 14th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Hm. If I said anything suggesting my push for “books” was a push for “classics,” my mistake. While there’s nothing like a grounding in the real Homer and Plato (both very readable and enjoyable in the right translations) and Bible and so forth for actual knowledge of what they’re about (otherwise, you’re at the mercy of professors or preachers, god save you), I’m thinking as much of simply long books period. Histories of the Renaissance, of the Scientific Revolution. Theories of statecraft or biographies of Darwin or Jefferson. Whatever. Just more big picture arguments and meditations than are afforded by even the best blog posts or online articles.
Somehow related to all of this is my own recent attempt to “slow blog” my thoughts on what Gilgamesh tells us about our past and present. The task was not well-served by serial posts. It slammed me to the limits (my limits, I guess) of blogging – and it showed me that some ideas are so slow, so big, so long they belong in books.
Hm. Can you imagine Howard Zinn writing a People’s History of the United States online to the same effect? And can you imagine getting the coherent perspective of that epic history by reading all the ideas as short posts from different bloggers or wikipediers around the web?
Is this frame even valid? You tell me. It’s almost 4 a.m., so I’m suspect.
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Morgante Pell Reply:
December 14th, 2008 at 3:47 am
Clearly, some ideas (particularly large ones) are best developed through cohesive books.
However, I would actually disagree with your frame: I think any piece which is built around chronology (however distant) can work well on a “blog.” Indeed, this format might even add to the air of discovery: the “story” must reveal itself over time, just as it originally was.
I’m sure we agree that not all books worth reading are “classics.”
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No. 4 — December 13th, 2008 at 4:44 am
First, really glad to see you back online and blogging Morgante. Missed your voice.
I’d agree that most students wouldn’t read the classics if they weren’t exposed to them in school, but I have to say that most adults wouldn’t read them either, myself included. Unlike Clay, I was not moved by the “greats” and I fully admit that says something about both my tastes and my intellect.
I’m frustrated by the slow education reality. I wish I could fast blog it out of existence. And I agree that our attempts to trumpet each of the molecules as they move one at a time from the past into the future are by and large fruitless in terms of providing a deeper understanding of what’s happening. We need the perspective that only time can give to understand it deeply.
But having said that, those bursts provide some powerful, useful glimpses along the way. That’s what I find so appealing…
Will Richardsons last blog post..Networked Learning: Why Not?
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No. 5 — December 13th, 2008 at 8:43 am
‘And that makes our thoughts more like mayflies flitting on that river than old growths towering beside it. Not much timelessness there.’
I must admit that my blogging has resulted in less time for reading the classics and more time in flitting through my latest Google Reader posts. But it’s posts like yours where I can relish the well turned phrase and the long sentence rich with imagery.
Paul Cs last blog post..Blogger Discovery
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No. 6 — December 14th, 2008 at 1:45 am
There are two basic types of blogging: the relayers and the synthesizers. The relayers manage to bounce information into our consciousness so that we can digest it, and the synthesizers manage to creatively process the information so that we can process the information at a new, deeper level so that we can act on information at a new creative level. Both are useful.
The act of “slow blogging” is encouraging deeper synthesis, although without the surface level of relay of basic ideas, we may not reach some of the synthesis that may be possible if we don’t continue to offer some of the “raw materials” as ideas in our blogging.
It’s up to each of us to judge how we manage information, and if we should manage to slowly distill concepts to the point of “slow blogging” then that’s a catalytic convertor that may or may not be borne out in the process of transmission.
It all boils down to choice – a choice to listen, to read, to convert, to process, to synthesize, to make an idea more relevant, or whether we choose to simply log ideas and accrue knowledge until we can connect a series in a beautiful, intricate pattern that will be recognized as eloquence.
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No. 7 — December 14th, 2008 at 2:23 am
I’m going to paraphrase something I heard from a TED talk that succinctly exppresses my view, and that is that a blog should be like a dress, short enough to keep interest, but long enough to cover the subject.
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No. 8 — December 14th, 2008 at 8:02 am
the dreaded page length question:
“How long should it be Ms. Tabor?”
“Long enough to explain your thinking.”
“Is that three pages?”
“I won’t know until I read it.”
Okay, that’s simplistic, but I always tell students that I don’t weigh their papers before I read them. Nor do I decide to read or not read a blog post based on length.
As a blog writer, I have started to post about events in my teaching life when I am still in the middle of synthesizing my understanding of the event, but still the posts come out long. Long enough to “cover the subject” – at least for me.
Kate Tabors last blog post..Putting all the pieces together
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No. 9 — December 14th, 2008 at 11:55 am
I know I just posted on this over where I am, but to restate …
“Uh-huh.” “Yep.” “What he said.” “You’re right.” “She makes a good point.”
To jump on Kate’s comment, my reply is “as long as you think it needs to be.” I’d rather murder the essay AFTER it’s written
Toms last blog post..Insert size matters joke here
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No. 10 — December 16th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Sorry couldn’t stay long enough to comment, because I have 77 other blogs to skim today. I did catch some of what you and the other commenters said, as I read every other line of your work.
Seriously, sometimes it is all too much and we have to decided how to adjust accordingly. I am still try to find a happy medium. Thanks for a great post.
Seriously I want to get my reader down to zero so I can rest. This behavior can’t not be productive.
Jabiz Raisdanas last blog post..Parrots on the Sill
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