Blogging ‘Deliberately’

The RoostLast week in my introductory post, I suggested (only half jokingly) that I launched this blog “because I wished to blog deliberately.” Don’t worry, I’m not really going to write a Walden parody — for one thing, the competition is too intimidating; how could I top this? But I’ve been thinking that I should say a few more specific things about what I’m planning to do here (you know, just to “manage expectations,” as they say), and what it might actually mean to blog deliberately.

One thing it means — maybe the most important thing — is to slow down. (In blogging, as in life!) Step back. Go for a walk (all devices off). Maybe just sit quiet and still. And as much as possible, get my head out of the 24/7 media bubble — the blogosphere, the twitterverse, or whatever we’re calling it now.

In other words, deliberately means not too fast, and not too much. The point here isn’t speed and quantity. There’s a place for those, and plenty of others are offering them — and doing it better, and more usefully, than I could ever hope to do. I’ll post here two or three times a week — sometimes less, very rarely more. And you can expect a mix of shorter and longer posts (they won’t all be as long as my first three; but some, every once in a while, may even be longer).

What sort of posts? I want to offer original material as much as I can, not just links and quotes, or coverage of the coverage. And I want to bring other voices into this space. Thoreau Farm, and ThoreauFarm.org, are meant to be places of ideas and conversation. So I’ll be featuring more interviews and exchanges with writers and thinkers I find interesting, important, or provocative — and, hopefully, offering guest posts every once in a while. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting conversations with Bill McKibben on localism, climate politics, and civil disobedience; David Roberts of Grist on the media; Paul Kingsnorth on the Dark Mountain Project and his recent, much talked-about essay in Orion magazine; and Mark Hertsgaard on the challenges of climate adaptation. That should get us rolling.

Closer to home, I plan to write a series of posts on Thoreau Farm itself, the surrounding landscape (natural and otherwise), and especially our neighbors at Gaining Ground, the community food project that shares this patch of earth in Concord.  Localism — local food, local energy, and all sorts of efforts to build community resilience — will be a recurring theme (and there’s plenty of it to write about in this neck of the woods). From time to time, I’ll write about my own experience with Transition Wayland, the nascent initiative we’ve got going in the town where I live, and the challenges (and rewards) of local, grassroots organizing — and how it all connects to the big picture.

Occasionally, I’ll write longer, essay-like posts responding to books or articles or other media, and yes, I may even do the dreaded quick-hit posts on what I’m reading at the moment. But for the most part, if you want to see what I’m reading and thinking about day to day, follow my Twitter feed. (And even there, I’m highly selective in what I tweet.) And, of course, I’ll blog about our Thoreau Farm forums, both before and after. Keep your eyes out for an update on our next one.

Back in 1995, in my first published essay (!), I took issue with Sven Birkerts (who I’ve since worked with many times) and his book The Gutenberg Elegies, and the big question of what the Web and our digital media might mean for our reading and writing lives. (More recently, I weighed in on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows for The Boston Globe, and decided that Birkerts was largely right!). And I spent the first decade of my journalism career working in the trenches of the “digital revolution,” at TheAtlantic.com and PBS Frontline.org. I suppose that if there’s one thing we’ve learned since those days, it’s that ever-increasing speed and quantity — the acceleration and proliferation of media forms — far more than merely the transition from print to screen, has been the real revolution. I won’t pretend that I’m not a contributor to that process, or that we can ever turn back the clock. But maybe, by blogging (and yes, tweeting) deliberately, we can use the technology to subvert its own tendencies. Or our own tendencies, as the case may be.

Wen Stephenson

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