Slow Blogging

I opened this blog at the end of September, planning to use it as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family during my two big autumn trips, to post anecdotes and photographs of my experiences in California and New York (six weeks from late September to early November) and Damascus (five weeks from mid November to late December), which have kept me away from home for about the last three months. The kind of diary I have always liked to keep on big trips, from the two-week A-level Geography field trip to Iceland (written in a book), to the weekly emails I sent during my PhD research year in Madrid. A blog seemed to me the natural evolution of these earlier forms of communication. In the end, of course, I was far too busy doing the things I was in the States and Syria to do, and did not have the time to sit down and compose any bloggings.

This has caused me to be the brunt of some ridicule from my sister. It turns out, however, that I am not alone in wanting to take my time over crafting something that I think is worth being posted here - it seems that unwittingly I am part of an internet phenomenon, known as 'Slow Blogging'. There is a whole article about it in the Guardian, which I serendipitously found in one of the occasional issues I managed to buy in a little shop on Straight Street, and hungrily read cover-to-cover, meaning I now know more about current international news than I have done for years, despite the feeling of isolation from it all that I felt in Damascus.

Slow Blogging, according to Todd Sieling as reported in The New York Times, is "a rejection of immediacy ... an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly", and represents "a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time".

You can read the full piece here, but I would like to add my endorsement to the writer's final paragraph:

"Let's hear it for all those who take the time to think, study and reflect before they post; who do not feel the need to slap the first thing that comes out of their head straight onto the web. People who refuse to update five times a day, or even once a week. People who value quality over quantity."

That might be my own manifesto for this blog! I will, over the coming weeks, post anecdotes and photographs of my experiences in America and Syria, and other notes and thoughts, but don't expect this to happen too quickly!