Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Frankly, I've given little thought to how I write, because writing is such an essential part of who I am that I just accept that it's something I do a lot. But that doesn't mean I'm one of these obsessive bloggers who feels the compunction to post a dozen entries a day just to drive up traffic. In fact, I would guess that if I looked at my writing habits over the last couple of years, I'd notice a significant drop in terms of frequency and word count. This is probably due to three factors: new job, new baby and no international travel. When I was running the Digital Divide Network, I treated blogging as a part of my job, particularly when I was traveling overseas, where there was always something interesting to blog about. Even after a long day, jetlagged in some faraway place, I still found the energy to sit down and crank out 10,000 words of thoughts about the day. For me it was better than Melatonin. But now I'm traveling a lot less; 2006 was the first calendar year since 1994 in which I didn't leave the US. And considering I hit somewhere close to 30 countries in the last few years prior to that, it was quite a shift. At home, of course, there are still plenty of blogable subjects, but priorities shift, and that's just the way it is.

Nonetheless, it's not like I've taken a sabbatical from blogging - far from it. For the last eight months I've written my twice-a-week column for the PBS blog, learning.now, and I still contribute to my own blog when I can - though much of my efforts have focused more on video as of late. Here on this blog, I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 850,000 words since I first started my original Waste of Bandwidth back in 1994. And still, I haven't given much thought in terms of how I do it.

For one thing, I read a lot. There are innumerable sources of good ideas on the Internet, including news sources and other bloggers. I'm a self-described news junkie, and begin to go a little crazy if I haven't had my fill of CNN and Google News a few times during the day. You might assume that I have an RSS reader jammed with hundreds of feeds, but actually I don't. My RSS reader sticks to no more than a couple dozen sources that I really care about, then I make a point at visiting certain sources that act as summaries for topics that interest me. My morning coffee isn't complete without reading Techcrunch and Engadget, while I can't eat lunch at my desk without reading the Washington Post op-ed pages. And I always go out of my way to read anything that's been passed along to me from the WWWEDU list or DIGITALDIVIDE list.

Of course, I could probably find a dozen things a day to write about, but I can't. That's because I have a day job, and NPR probably won't look too kindly at me dropping my work just so I could blog about yet another wacky story I read about on BoingBoing. So I've gotten more selective in terms of what I write about. I tend to avoid stories that have gotten beaten to death in the blogosphere or mainstream media, and embrace topics that are important, yet hovering below the radar. Anything related to the digital divide, edtech, the media or tech culture in general is fair game, but I tend to select stuff that has social or policy implications, rather than just rehashing headlines. And I'm a sucker for off-kilter stories, like when Nepal's national airline did an ad campaign to promote the country using images from Machu Picchu - in Peru.

On most occasions, when I have something to say, I just write it. I don't think it through; I don't craft outlines or strategies. I just start typing. Sometimes I'll skip the opening paragraph and write the middle first, then go back to write the intro, since the intro needs to set the stage for the bulk of the story - and I don't always know what the story will be until I write it. On rare occasions I take a few notes prior to writing, but that only happens when I'm writing about a complex topic and I don't want to forget about a certain point I need to make.

It's also common for me to write about something in response to what other people are saying online. This is particularly true on my PBS blog. On these occasions, I go out and review a sampling of sources covering whatever happens to be the topic at hand, then select quotes from a representative group of them, cutting and pasting them into my word processor before crafting my commentary around them.

Above all, I'm an ardent believer in flow. This is the word used by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MEE-high CHICK-saint-mee-high) to describe the state of mind in which you are totally immersed within an idea, with new thoughts flowing out of you, almost as fast as you can process them. Some people describe flow in jazz-like terms, being caught up in the rhythm, in the groove, riffing and improvising effortlessly. Csikszentmihalyi himself described it like this in an interview he did 10 years ago with Wired Magazine:

Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

Guitarist Pete Townshend has used similar language to describe the act of performing on stage, equating it with a Sufi-like ecstatic experience. (I'm a big fan of the late Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was the personification of on-stage creative ecstasy.) While I won't go so far as to say that I get my jollies from writing a good blog entry, I understand what Townshend and Csikszentmihalyi are getting at. Particularly when I'm travel blogging, breaking a story that hasn't been covered by the blogosphere yet, or editing a video I'm passionate about, I lose track of time and get totally absorbed in the process. Writing - or perhaps I should say creativity, since I feel this way about video production as well - is a cathartic process for me, akin to a form of meditation. When I've written something I feel strongly about, I feel energized while composing it, relaxed upon completing it.

Usually I can tell instinctively whether or not a topic will get me jazzed and in flow. Before the new job and the birth of Kayleigh, I had a higher tolerance for writing about stuff that was mildly interesting, just to keep my blog from going silent for long periods of time. Now I feel less of a need to do that. If I don't have anything interesting to write on my personal blog for a week, so be it. Since I'm not relying on advertising dollars, I can afford to have my visitor rates fluctuate. And now I feel like I can blog about the things I care about without it becoming consumed by it. -andy