Joe Lamantia.com

In a world that’s mov­ing so fast it’s hard to keep track of when you are, let alone where, there’s a need for expe­ri­ences that move at more relaxed paces. This basic need for delib­er­ately mod­er­ated and human-speed expe­ri­ences bet­ter tuned to the way that peo­ple make and under­stand mean­ing is the ori­gin of the Slow Food move­ment.
Nat­u­rally, there’s room for a vir­tual ana­log of slow food. I’m call­ing this kind of medi­ated expe­ri­ence that flows at a kinder, gen­tler pace “slow media”. Dawdlr, “a global com­mu­nity of friends and strangers answer­ing one sim­ple ques­tion: what are you doing, you know, more gen­er­ally?” is a good exam­ple.

Assem­bled one post­card at a time, Dawdlr exem­pli­fies the col­lec­tive form of Slow Media, one you can con­tribute to by cre­at­ing some con­tent using a stan­dard inter­face and then sub­mit­ting it for pub­li­ca­tion, as long as it car­ried the proper postage. The paper blog — now updated and known as paper­cast — might be a pre­cur­sor.
What are some other exam­ples of Slow Media? Back in Jan­u­ary of 2007, AdBusters asked, “Isn’t it time to slow down?” dur­ing their national slow­down week.
Slow food has a web­site, annual gath­er­ings, pub­li­ca­tions, a man­i­festo, even a mas­cot / icon — the snail of course. What’s next for slow media? Maybe a slow wiki, made up of image-mapped screen shots of chalk­boards with writ­ing?