- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 14
-
Sparkle (0)
We live in a technological age. When we say, "I'm working," we mean that we are sitting still in front of a computer. When we see the daylight, it is for brief moments on the way to and from the place where we sit still in front of a computer. We IM, Tweet, email, text, and call people all day long for instant communication with instant access and instant decisions. Our favorite action verb is google, our favorite social invitation is follow me on Twitter.
Would it improve your life to slow down a bit? Reflect on quality instead of responding with quantity? There's a community of people, appropriately calling themselves 'Slow Community,' who think it might be valuable to take some things slowly.
Thanks to a tip from TW, I learned about Slow Community from Nancy White at Full Circle Associates. I'd heard of the Slow Food Movement, but not the Slow Community movement. Her blog post A Slow Community Movement? turned quite a few people to the idea. She wrote,
In the rush to colonize the possibility of community on the internet, with its characteristic speed and fleetness of metaphorical foot, we may have lost sight of the fact that some of our most precious communities are slow, small and underfunded.
What kind of magic is this? What should we be paying attention to?
Is it time for a “slow community” movement? What would that look like to you? More importantly, how would it make your world a better place?
Bev Traynor responded with Time to get behind, where she said,
• Knowledge sharing and learning has imposed high expectations on what you have to produce for other people. We look for places to chill out and produce nothing.
• Work taking place behind closed doors is appreciated for reducing the “noise” level on the internet.
• Tools are only a small part of the story and their effectiveness is the way they can be synched with tiny human foibles.
• There is too much information about. Thinking twice about distributing information freely and unthinkingly is a mark of good practice and consideration.
• It is a challenge to find out what those people who don’t have time to publish are saying are doing and becoming.
• Thinking quietly alone is a luxury and sought after.
Eva Schiffer from Net-Map Toolbox commented
Maybe I have worked in the agric sector for too long but I have come to think of initiating change in agricultural metaphors of planting, watering, weeding and harvesting and start to understand (at least in theory, alas) that you can’t make anything grow faster by pulling at its leaves…
LaDonna Coy from Technology in Prevention also commented, saying,
I find these days, the more I am working with technology in communities, the more difficult it is for me to put some things ahead of others in a linear way. More often than not there is significant looping back to inform actions more clearly and yet it would appear to an observer that looping back is wasted time. Your post and several of the comments make me think that maybe sometimes slowing down and looping back or standing still is exactly what we need to do. Maybe we ask a different question, maybe the slow motion helps us to get new people connected and engaged and maybe we need to experience and recognize the pattern.
Nancy White created a wiki at Slow Community after she saw the reactions to her blog post, and—of course—gave the idea some slow thought.
At Rituals for Healthy Living, blogger Amy Lenzo wrote A Beauty Walk Each Morning, where she tells us,
I commit to taking a beauty walk each morning, no matter how short, and most importantly I do NOT open ANY email, or even my computer, in the morning until I have at least stepped outside and taken several breaths of fresh air. That’s the bare minimum, but more usually it is a half hour to an hour and a half walk where I notice all the beauty around me and greet it with gratitude and awe.
More Resources:
Carl Honore wrote a book called In Praise of Slowness. You Tube has a video of his talk at the TED conference.
The site Slow Movement is devoted entirely to slowing down. The site says,
This website tells us how. It is gives examples of ways to live slow and be part of the slow movement. It points out the areas of our life that have become disconnected.
