Still Here. Still Slow Cloth. Still Not Caught Up. Still Not a Gadget. And If You're Still Here, Thank You.

Here's a nice piece on Slow Cloth and natural dyeing from Jeannine Roediger in Van Wert, Ohio. Thank you, Jeannine, for including me. Quite a few textile-related people and groups are attaching "slow" to their names now, and they're not all the same; I think in general this trend is good, though to be honest, I like my definition. It's probably due for a review and some streamlining but it is still more complete than anyone else's, and has stood up pretty well for the past four years. Time to do more with it - I know I've been threatening that for a while.

It's the end of August - oh my. I'm taking this week off from what has been an incredibly busy and challenging few months at work--mostly I came home exhausted and perhaps with a bad case of decision fatigue--and my list of things to do is long. It includes finally launching a new blog on Wordpress and moving my Slow Cloth Facebook group page to a regular community page, which only means anything if you're on Facebook. Facebook generates as much frustration as connection, unfortunately, with its constant changes, privacy issues, and propensity toward self-promotion, but there you have it.They "upgraded" the group format and in the process took away all of our lovely and thoughtful discussion threads; those all just disappeared, and damn, that's a shame. There were wonderful ideas and thoughts in those discussions.

Speaking of online communities, Jaron Lanier wrote You Are Not a Gadget a few years ago and I highly recommend it. It's not an easy book to read, but his concept of digital humanism is profoundly important, I think. He's in favor of the expert (the artist, author, editor, curator, writer) rather than the crowdsourced, lowest-common-denominator way of creating content and making creative decisions. He's in favor of names rather than anonymity, to limit the venom that's all too ubiquitous on the web. He's in favor of decisions that create options instead of limit them. I'm still reading it, but I do recommend it highly if you're online and looking for an understanding of how online communities operate, and even a code of ethics for your online work.

More update soon. Thank you for still being here! I'm trying to catch up, I really am.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Lainie]

Hi Kaite, yes, you're probably right. It's been (and still is) a messy process of trying to figure out what to do with my ideas. But I'm so glad you're still here, still reading. Thank you.

[KaiteM.]

still here reading. i'm wondering about the word slow, as it already had it's own provenance maybe a new word would have lasted longer, in it's complete meaning, such as sSlow or whatever. However it's all water slowly flowing under the bridge now.
do what you think best suits you personally.

[Meg in Nelson]

Did you say Slow Cloth will be in a blog format? Did I read it right? Hurray!

[marja-leena]

I'm glad you are still here! Good luck with the new projects and catching up. I feel like I never catch up but just do what I can by priority, the rest just waits sometimes seemingly forever.