A Ramble About the Slow Web

Sooooooooo I go back and forth about blogging. Sometimes I think, “hey I should blog all the time, every day. I should just blog about my day and stuff. And sometimes, write longer essays and whatnot, because so much of today’s writing happens in slacks or twitter and you can’t make any kind of good argument on those!”

But then again I think, hmmm, what if blogging shouldn’t exist? I kind of run with the assumption that because “blogging is dying” that means “blogging must be saved” and maybe that’s a faulty assumption. Maybe blogging was just this thing that happened for a while and that while is now passing.

Also, and this is a big also, I worry that people are inundated with stuff to read and process, and most of the time I don’t think my writing (especially the “this is what I did today” stuff) is worth adding on to those piles. We talk about The Feed but really it’s The Flood. And it’s not that I think my writing is terrible necessarily or anything, just that, I respect people’s attention (or maybe, I fear a global lack of concentration / understanding) such that I don’t want to derail it unless I have something Real Important to talk about, and usually I don’t.

There’s another possible world where I blog, but it’s a kind of lowkey affair, for those who want to check in on me from time to time (aka my friends!). And that’s a nice feeling. Or something like an online diary.

I’m constantly amazed by and enamoured with Jason Kottke, whose eponymous website has been running for nearly 20 years (and it’s his full time job). These days it’s a kind of “what Jason K finds interesting on any given day” but hey, since he’s been running the website for almost 20 years, some of it is kind of an online diary. I found myself looking at his archives for September 2001 today and it’s kind of incredible to read his feelings as the month goes by (I should say, it’s his + the world through his eyes’s feelings).

Another cool aspect of his website is he’s tagged most of his posts, so if you want to find neat stuff about maps or NYC or music or space or whatever, go wild. Years of the web at your disposal. This is kind of what my pinboard has become for me (and for anybody who stumbles across it): click on one of the tags and tumble down the rabbit hole of links I’ve grabbed on the topic.

Which reminds me of something I’ve been internally referring to as “the slow web,” the kind of stuff you find on the web that doesn’t exist in a chronological order (it doesn’t have to be “timeless” or anything, just not something that only makes sense in a timeline). In that way, it’s kind of the anti-blog, or the anti-feed (or the anti-flood). One of the defining factors of blogging or microblogging is that they happen in a chronological manner. You post with some frequency, and then others read your stuff in that order (or the reverse of that order). It means that everything has a kind of sticky nowness, you come to the blog every day to see the new stuff. In that way blogging is a lot less like a book and a lot more like a news program or a tv show or whatever. It’s mostly about now. And now is an OK time, but it’s not the only time. I’m kind of interested in writing things, or making things, that maybe you don’t read constantly. Maybe you find it and you read the whole thing and then you’re done and there’s no incentive to come back unless you want to read the whole thing again. Or maybe it’s something you come to and read a bunch of and then forget about and then one day remember for some reason you can’t quite put your finger on but you’re elated because you really enjoyed it the first time and so you start reading it again but oh boy it’s maybe kind of different this time because there’s new stuff in it. (A wiki is like that).

So anyway, a pinboard is kind of the slow web from a reader’s perspective. It’s fine to follow an RSS feed of it to keep up with what somebody else bookmarks, but there’s also this whole other mode of reading a given tag at random, and doing that doesn’t really depend on time, doesn’t depend on “keeping up on it” or anything like that.

So anyway, that’s what’s on my mind today. I don’t know what to make of it (figuratively or literally). Probably nothing for a while.