Overcoming posting-paralysis?

[Summary: I’m trying to post a bit more critical reflection on things I read, and to write up more of my learning in shared space. I’ve been exploring why that’s been feeling difficult of late.] 

Reading, blogging and engaging through social media used to be a fairly central part of my reflective learning practice. In recent years, my reading, note-taking and posting practices have become quite frayed. Although many times I get as far as a draft post or tweet thread of reflections, I’m often hit by a posting-paralysis – and I stop short both of engaging in open conversation, and solidifying my own reflections through a public post. As I return to a mix of freelance facilitation, research and project work (more on that soon), I’m keen to recover an open learning practice that makes effective use of online spaces

Inspired by Lloyd Davis’ explorations in ‘learning how to work out loud again’(appropriately so, since Lloyd’s earlier community convening and event hosting was a big influence on much of my earlier practice), I’m taking a bit of time in my first few days weeks back at work to identify what I want from a reflective learning practice, to try and examine the barriers I’ve been encountering, and to prototype the tools, processes and principles that might help me recapture some of the thinking space that, at it’s best, the online realm can still (I hope) provide.

Why post anyway?

The caption of David Eaves’ blog comes to mind: “if writing is a muscle, this is my gym”. And linked: writing is a tool of thought. So, if I want to think properly about the things I’m reading and engaging with, I need to be writing about them. And writing a blog post, or constructing a tweet thread, can be a very effective way to push that writing (and thinking) beyond rough bullet points, to more complete thoughts. Such posts often work well as external memory: more than once I’ve searched for an idea, and come upon a blog post I wrote about it many years ago – rediscovering content I might not have found had it been buried in a personal notebook. (It turns out comments from spam bots are also a good ‘random-access-memory-prompt’ on a wordpress blog.)

I’ve also long been influenced by my colleague Bill Badham’s commitment to shared learning. My work often affords me the privilege to read, research and reflect – and there’s something of an obligation to openly share the learning that arises. On a related note, I’m heavily influenced by notions of open academic debate, where there’s a culture (albeit not uncomplicated) of raising questions or challenging data, assumptions and conclusions in the interest of getting to better answers.

So what’s stopping you?

At risk of harking back to a golden age of RSS and blogging, that died along with Google Reader, I suspect I need to consciously adapt my practices to a changed landscape.

Online platforms have changed. I felt most fluent in a time of independent bloggers, slowly reading and responding to each other over a matter of days and weeks. Today, I discover most content via Tweets rather than RSS, and conversations appear to have a much shorter half-life, often fragmenting off into walled garden spaces, of fizzling out half completed as they get lost between different timezones. I’m reluctant to join discussions on walled garden platforms like Facebook, and often find it hard to form thoughts adequately in tweet length.

My networks have changed. At the macro level, online spaces (and public discourse more generally) feels more polarised and quick to anger: although I only find this when I voyage outside the relatively civil filter bubble of online I seem to have built. On the upside, I feel as thought the people I’m surrounded with online are more global, and more diverse (in part, from a conscious effort to seek more gender balance and diversity in who I follow): but on the flip-side, I’m acutely aware that when I write I can’t assume I’m writing into a common culture, or that what I intend as friendly constructive critique will be read as such. Linked to this:

I’m more aware of unintended consequences of a careless post. In particular, I’m aware that, as a cis white male online, I don’t experience even half of the background aggression, abuse, gaslighting or general frustration that many professional women, people of colour, or people from minority communities may encounter daily. What, for me, might be a quick comment on something I’ve read, could come across to others as ‘yet another’ critical comment rather than the ‘Yes, and’ I meant it to be.

There are lots of subtleties to navigate around when an @ mention might be seen as a hat-tip credit, vs. when it might be an unwelcome interruption.

My role has changedI still generally think of myself as a learner and junior practitioner, just trying to think out loud. But I’ve become aware from a couple of experiences that sometimes people take what I write more seriously! And that can be a little bit scary, or can place a different pressure on what I’m writing. Am I writing for my own process of thinking? Writing for others? Or writing for impact? Will my critical commentary be taken as having a weight I did not intend? And at the times when I do intend to write in order to influence, rather than just offer a viewpoint, do I need different practices?

My capacity, and focus, has changedThe pandemic and parenthood have squeezed out many of the time-slots I used to use for reflective writing: the train back from London, the early evening and so-on. I’m trying to keep social media engagement to my working hours too, to avoid distractions and disruption during time with family.

Over editingA lot of the work I’ve done over recent years has involved editing text from others, and it’s made me less comfortable with the flow-of-writing, overly subclaused, and less-than-perfectly-clear sentences I’m prone to blogging with. (Though I can still resist that inner editor, as this mess of a paragraph attests: I am writing mainly for my own thinking after all.)

So what do I do about it?

Well – I’m certainly not over posting paralysis: this post has been sitting in draft for a week now. But in the process of putting it together I’ve been exploring a few things:

• A more conscious reading practice
• Improving my note-taking tools
• Linking blogging and social media use
• Not putting too much pressure on public posting

I’ve brought scattered notes from the last few years together into a tiddlywiki instance, and have started trying to keep a daily journal there for ad-hoc notes from articles or papers I’m reading – worrying less about perfect curation of notes, and more about just capturing reflections as they arise. I’ve reset my feed reader, and bookmarking tools to better manage a reading list, and am trying to think more carefully about the time to give to reading different things.

I’ve also tried getting back to a blog-post format for responding to things I’m reading, rather than trying twitter threads, which, whilst they might have a more immediate ‘reach’, often feel to me both a bit forced, and demand more immediate follow-up to engage with than my capacity allows.

I was considering setting myself an artificial goal of posting daily or weekly, but for now I’m going to allow a more organic flow of posting, and review in a few weeks to see if developing the diagnosis, and some of the initial steps above, are getting my practice closer to where I want it to be.

I’ve posted this.