A few months back, I got a bit “meta” here on Groundswell and began reflecting on the project I had undertaken in this blog, all in preparation for a refocus in content and a realignment of design.
Please forgive and humor me while I undergo that process once again.
I initially imagined this space as an outlet for all the writing and thinking I wanted to do related to land, language, community, service, and sustainability. But then I stumbled into a great job, with a great group, working to reform the media, empower people’s voices, and protect the role of communication(s) in our democracy. A shift occurred, and into the matrix of issues already swirling through my mind, I added the political economy of media. It’s been fun and productive to watch these issues collide here on this blog.
This fall another important shift occurred. My son was born and in the lead up to that event and in the months since, everything I care about has been re-framed through the lens of parenthood. I can’t help but write about these issues with him in mind. At the same time, my time for writing about these issues has diminished dramatically. It has been easier to update my Facebook status or my Twitter account, than to develop the kind of extended essays I have traditionally posted here. And thus, I have not been posting much.
Recently I have been toying with the notion of killing off this blog and replacing it with more of a micro-blogging forum like Tumblr. In the end, the deciding factor was that I couldn’t move my past writing from WordPress to Tumblr, and I did not want my writing scattered all over the web. And so I took a fresh look at WordPress (who has just made big strides in their admin/backend usability) and am today relaunching Groundswell as something somewhat new.
You can expect to see the same kind of long-form, contemplative essays that I have written in the past here (perhaps less of them), but in addition to that you will also notice interesting web-clippings, quotes, photos, brief reflections and a variety of other detrius from my mind and my life. In the world of new social media some call this a lifestream or mindcast (think broadcast, webcast, podcast, etc…). I am hoping this new form will allow me to update more often, bring more and different threads together, and capture the pieces of my work and life even as they shift and change around me.
Josh Stearns 