Is Your Life Poetry or Nihilism?

ReadWriteWeb asks this question. Poetry is reflective. Journalism also should be reflective (if all journalism were like C-SPAN, we would be better off for it). I am sure we could and perhaps will find ways to mine activity feeds for patterns and other useful information. It may find uses in many fields and places in life, perhaps even in medicine. But the real reason why there is so little reflection on the web is simply because the structures and tools of the web encourage shallow interaction, quick posts, short content, quick reads, quick writes. This is an area I've given some thought to and posted to the blog about it.

What is required is not some new gizmo for finding patterns in bits of trivial data, but tools that encourage people to slow down, to be reflective and create meaningful content. My idea presented here has been of a "quick-slow" system. This system would recognize the importance of brief, concise posts when things are happening (like you've just landed safely in an aircraft with the landing gear stuck and want to tell your friends or the world) and longer, slower, more reflective posts. This system would allow users to post concise messages like Twitter does, but those messages could be expanded on, by expanding the text or by associating longer texts with them. The idea is not entirely new. About ten years ago, I played with a prototype application trying to combine blog and wiki elements. Later, I discovered a more successful project to combine blog and wiki, and an application exists called a bliki.

What I propose is a system like Twitter, which retains its immediacy through a connection to text messaging (cell phones) and the "stream of concise posts" format, yet also provides a way to extend those posts in a meaningful way. Perhaps a user's followers could be allowed to edit the extended content, creating a community of editors and contributors.

What we really need is to encourage people who grew up "network native" to slow down and think before the write, or at the very least, if they have to capture an event or thought with quick, impressionist strokes, they or others should be able to return later after reflection to revise. A kind of "slow news" for journalism, akin to the slow foods movement, asking people to sit down and think a while before they write. This may be asking too much for journalism, but a quick-slow approach could support both quick impressions (what's new) and reflection (analysis). Moreover, this could support a collaborative approach that mixes reportage (the initial concise post, possibly with a picture) and analysis (the associated post, perhaps by an analyst).

The poet Basho revised his haiku many times over the years, sometimes refining the wording and other times he would write a new poem, depicting the same experience from a different aspect. This kind of revision and reflection should be encouraged and supported by technology. Haiku are an ideal model. Brief, concise, experiential, yet through juxtaposition and the many hours of careful writing, they convey higher truths.

I see a number of people writing on Twitter in haiku form, quite a few who are just arranging prose in haiku form and really have no understanding of haiku as an art form (poetry has to say something to be poetry, and say it in a way that affects us). I want to be clear, there is a new form of haiku practice emerging on Twitter, which is akin to the the impressionist movement in painting, where haiku are written on the spot and posted to Twitter from a cell phone. This is a new development in haiku, since most haiku are written down long after the poet has left the place of experience (not always, Basho sometimes wrote haiku and left them behind, but nearly all the haiku that reach us were probably revised many times long after he had visited the location). It bears watching.