Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.

I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

This is a prediction for 2019 and beyond: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/

It’s a series of questions that has dogged Friends since we did away with clergy and started calling baptism a “sprinkling,” and it has been an issue of contention in every Quaker schism: Are we Christian? Are we really Christian? Does it matter if we’re Christian? What does it even mean to be Christian in the world?

One reason we began publishing more themed issues beginning in 2012 was so we use the topics to invite fresh voices to write for us. While we’ve long had regulars who will send us a few articles a year on miscellaneous topics, themes allow us to tempt people with specific interests and ministries: reconciliation from war, climate activism, workplace reform, mentorship, ecumenical relationships, the wider family of Friends, etc.

More recently I’ve started these “Editor’s Desk” posts as a way of sharing some of the ideas we have around particular upcoming issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up submissions. I also hope that others will share the URL via email.

The absolute best way of reaching new people is when someone we know shares an upcoming theme with someone we don’t know. There are many people who by chance or inclination seem to straddle Quaker worlds. They are invaluable in amplifying our calls for submissions. Question: would it help if we started an email list just for writers or for people who want to be reminded of upcoming themes so they can share them with Friends?

Page not found — Friends Journal

Friends Journal

• Do we have a vision of what kind of Quakerism we’re inviting people into?
• Does growing necessitate casting off or re-embracing various Quaker practices?
• Can we point to specific and reproducible tasks that meetings have done that have led to growth?
• Are there models from other churches or social change movements that we could learn from?
• What are the dangers of over-focusing on growth?
• Is there really a possibility that Quakerism could become a mass movement?
• What would our Quaker experiences look like if our numbers rose even ten-fold?

One thing that’s missing there is the internet. Yet one of the most common things people want to talk about when we talk about growing Friends is the internet. I think we’ve gotten to the point at which we can’t just pin our hopes for future vitality of the Religious Society of Friends on the internet. It’s not a build-it-and-they-will come phenomenon, especially now that so much of the internet’s attention mechanisms are dominated by billion-dollar companies.

I went into the Friends Journal archives to get a little perspective on Friends’ evolving relationship with electronic media. The word “internet” first showed up near the end of 1992, in a short announcement of a new Quaker-themed listserv. In 1993 there was a fantastic article on electronic networks, The Invisible Meetinghouse. Written by Joel GAzis-SAx, it describes the Quaker Electronic Project as

an ongoing yearly meeting that Friends around the world can join any time. It is, at once, a library, a meetinghouse, a social center, and a bulletin board. W e have created both a community and a resource center…

Amazingly, many of the people mentioned in this article from 25 years ago are still active online.

The first “http” web address was published in Friends Journal in a 1995 issue. In June 2001 the magazine announced its own website; the word “blog” debuted in 2004, “Facebook” in 2007, “Twitter” in 2011. Obviously, the internet is great for outreach. But time check: we’ve been collectively reaching out online for a quarter century. Every organization has a website. Blogs and social media have become a settled tool in outreach.

Introductions to the web and techniques and how-to’s have been done. But how do these various media work together to advance our visibility? What kind of expanded outreach could happen with a little more focus? How does any online project integrate with real-world activity. I’m not naysaying the internet; obviously, I could give my answers to these questions. But I’d like to know what others think about our Quaker electronic projects a quarter century later?

Page not found — Friends Journal

Friends Journal

I’m in this funny position where I have a quarter century of random Quaker factoids in my head, have access to great databases (like instant searches of Friends Journal’s 60+ years of articles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a discussion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have useful context. Some of it is historical (I geek out on the Quaker past) but some of it is just my lived memory. I’ve been in and out of Quaker offices for 27 years now. I’m entering this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a professional Quaker staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird talent to remember things I read years earlier. When the topic of clearness committees recently came up, I remembered that Deborah Haines had written a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGConnections newsletter (yes, groaner of a name but it was a great publication in its heyday). Thanks to Archive.org I could resurface the article and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been quietly been changing the idea of Quaker Ranter from a classic old-school blog to a daily email newsletter. I’ll still collect interesting Quaker links, as I’ve been doing for years with QuakerQuaker. But now I’ll annotate them and give them context. If there’s a side story I think is interesting I’ll tell it. I have a long train commute and writing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that something like this could help bring Quaker newcomers up to speed. Our insider language and unexplained (and sometimes dated) worldviews create an impediment for seekers. We kind of expect they’ll figure out things that aren’t so obvious. Learning factoids and histories a day at a time can give them some context to understand what’s happening Sunday morning. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quaker feature where people new to Friends can ask questions. I’ll be liberally pitching Friends Journal articles and QuakerSpeak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quaker media work, but I’m also all about spreading the love and will share many other great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get people contributing so it becomes a community watering hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free daily email list. At some point, this will probably outgrow the free tier of the email service I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send thesee emails out. For those of you with a little extra to give, Quaker Ranter Membership is a way to help offset these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quakerranter.org/email to sign up.

So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.

There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.

Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.

Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20

Quakerism is an experiential religion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doctrinal statements. The best way to learn what Quakers believe is through listening in on our conversations.

In the last few years, dozens of Quakers have begun sharing stories, frustrations, hopes and dreams for our religious society through blogs. The conversations have been amazing. There’s a palpable sense of renewal and excitement. QuakerQuaker is a daily index to that conversation.

I still like it as a distinctly Quaker philosophy of outreach.

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

Wilson cites Lockard Steele in Back to the Blog:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stupid fun linking to each other’s blog posts for no other reason than that they existed and that it amused us greatly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

Another one of his citations was Elizabeth Spiers, who followed up with a post Anything I Care About:

I don’t have to write as narrowly as I do when I publish in a regular media outlet. The upside of that for me is that I don’t feel compelled to stick to a particular topic. I can write about, as Fred put it, “anything I care about.”

One of my first thoughts is how annoyingly insider these posts feel. One of the qualities about the current internet is that our filtering mechanisms are so sophisticated and transparent that we don’t always see how self-selected a sliver of social media we’re seeing. Facebook and its mysterious algorithms are the example we all like to complain about. But Twitter is a different beast depending on who you follow and Google searches use hundreds of different signals to tailor results. Just because your cohort all stopped personal blogging in exchange for professionalized blogs ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s a universal phenomenon.

Whenever someone says they’re starting (or restarting) a blog I like to wait a few months before celebrating, as there’s a big difference between intent and actual writing. But I like the idea that personal blogs might be making a comeback among some of what we used to call the digerati.

But let’s not get too snobby about domains: how are Facebook posts not a personal blog? Is it just a matter of URLs? I have Facebook friends who put care into their online persona. People use Facebook and Tumblr and Instagram partly because they come with built-in audiences—but also because their crackerjack engineers have taken away the friction of blogging. When Wilson decided to experiment with this nouveau-blogging, he photoblogged a trip to his WordPress site. What happened? The photos were all oversized. One of the commenters asked Wilson “isn’t this a bit similar to what you’re already posting on Tumblr and Foursquare?” Well, yeah.

Anyway, all this is to say that I’ve blogged a lot more since I decided to make my Tumblr my personal blog. I’ve got the near-frictionless posting that keeps my photoblogging looking good but I’ve maintain the controlled URL of martinkelley.com to future proof against new technological platforms. But is it just the URL that makes it a personal blog?