John Miedema

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The Slow Movement brings a new attitude toward food and reading, a link that was made earlier with regard to bibliophagy. The Slow Food movement provides a new angle on the meaning of slow reading with regard to locality, i.e., one’s specific location on the planet. One of the themes of the Slow Food movement is the preservation of local food traditions and ecosystems; slow also means staying close to home. Similarly, reading can be slow not just in a temporal sense but also in a spatial sense by choosing to read local stories and content by local writers.

Smith & MacKinnon (2007) wrote The 100-Mile Diet, a record of their efforts to eating only local foods for a one-year period. They talked about the traceability of their food: “They know exactly where their food comes from, and under what circumstances it was produced” (54-55). This autochthonous knowledge is often missing in our web-based information. Schools teach students to properly cite their sources, including those from the web. But web-based material can change or vanish, and the sources can be quite obscure. It is not uncommon for people to forget an author’s name, let alone know the context in which he or she wrote the book. Slow readers may choose to seek out local writers and materials, thereby bringing this circumstantial information to the forefront of the reading experience.

The local aspect of slow reading fits with Birkets’ (1994) idea of vertical reading. The arrival of the printing press resulted in the production of far more books on a wider range of topics for many more people. It enabled what he calls horizontal reading, “a shift from intensive to extensive reading” (72). Horizontal reading takes us outward, laterally, to learn new ideas, whereas vertical reading takes us inward to learn more about what is at hand, that which is local.

Local writing is not necessarily better than global writing; it can often be worse. The global publishing industry serves a distillation function that filters out a lot of low quality material. It also filters out a lot of good and divergent voices that do not have sufficient market appeal. Many writers are discouraged trying to get published, and many publishers are equally frustrated, wishing the returns would allow them to take a risk on a new writer. The end result is the smothering of diversity. McChesney (1998) chronicled the change from regional media systems before the nineties to the global commercial media market by the dawn of the 21st century. He suggests that grassroots efforts at local media production would benefit from traditional publishing because it is cheaper than digital technology if produced in small quantities. This method will naturally lead to diversification. Even the global media will come looking for this content when its audience wearies of the banal content of mass programming.

(Note: There is an active community of letterpress enthusiasts and books arts programs. See for example, the Briar Press on-line at http://www.briarpress.org/.)

References

Birkets, Sven. (1994). The Gutenberg elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. Boston: Faber and Faber.

McChesney, Robert W. (1998). Media convergence and globalization. In Daya Kishan Thussu (Ed.), Electronic empires: Global media and local resistance (27-46). London: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Alisa & MacKinnon, J.B. (2007). The 100-Mile diet: A year of eating locally. Toronto: Vintage.