After my noon yoga class today I told Patty, the teacher, something along the lines of "you packed an awful lot into an hour." I meant this in the best way. She seemed a little surprised and simply asked me "Do you think it could be slower?"
It doesn't seem like it at first but we were both talking about the same thing. You can get even more when you go slow. You probably won't notice this in a single yoga class. You'll experience it in a yoga practice.
There's a lesson here, of course, for content strategy, storytelling, and fundraising.
Information comes at us through a firehose. Several firehoses, really. Social media is manic. Outrage and trauma that drips unabated. One engaging video after another. As compelling as one Reel or TikTok video may be it's often lost as the next one slides into view.
Here are a few recent ideas that turn "slow" (and deep, care, meaningful) into something more powerful than fast.
Jennifer Brandel, the founder of the newsroom engagement platform Hearken and a current John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, shared a piece the other day about Journalist as Circulator. In it she outlines the brilliant idea of what I interpret as a news organizer. Or a news circuit rider. Someone who is of and for the community and works with the community to make sense of news stories and turn their details and topics into tangible products that are not just help people but bring them into stories as civic action.
A couple months ago Sam Pressler shared a conversation he had with Esther Perel. Sam writes the Connective Tissue newsletter and founded the brilliant Armed Services Arts Partnership. Sam is also a fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and an expert on the human condition of interpersonal relationships (my summary, not hers).
Esther and Sam spoke about the loneliness epidemic and Sam's research/work on understanding how, amidst all this information and constant connection, people are disconnected, lonely, left behind. Putting info, ads, stories, posts, news out there...that's all so fast and easy now. The infrastructure of relationships that many groups once built and sustained? That's slowly been chipped away. Rebuilding it, should we choose to do so, will be slow. But so valuable.
A Nieman Lab article last week explored Chartbeat data to illustrate the declining ability of social platforms to drive traffic to news sites. Meaningful reach (as opposed to growing follower and view counts) has always been elusive on social though, by all means, keep spending those ad dollars.
A takeaway? It's easy to go fast, post, get eyeballs (or at least bot clicks). It's harder, and slower, to listen, hear, and create the stories that change people's way of thinking and acting.
Content, stories, and posts need relational infrastructure if we want to translate stories into action. Email is a distribution channel. Not a platform that can sustain and hold up relationships. Same goes for social media.
This means having people (humans, not agents or bots) who can create meaning from stories. These are the circulators and circuit riders and organizers. They bridge content and tech and audience needs.
Think of communications and engagement as a flowing system. These are the people who shift gears from the high speed social media platform and offramp some people onto byways where you can ask questions and have conversations. You move slower. But you get more.