The Death of Shitty Internet Experience and the Birth of Slow Media
“Slow Media emanate a special aura. They generate a feeling that the particular medium belongs to just that moment of the user’s life.” (The Slow Media Manifesto)
Let’s face the truth. Majority of the internet as it stands today makes us feel like shit. Going online gives us joy for a few glorious seconds and then leaves us empty and tormented until we come back online again. We’re forced (or, how we in a digital industry like to call it — incentivised) to come back and repeatedly click, like and share in order to experience the thrill again. Welcome to the peak of shitty internet era.
This is a story about a small online magazine you probably never heard of unless you’re Slovakian. There is a reason why you might want to care about it though, for it represents the part of the internet that cares about you. Welcome to the slow movement and the birth of Slow Media.
It creeped into my life without notice, only to make me realise later how bad the state of the internet was. It taught me a lot about the world of digital media, helped me leave Facebook and learn why offline world is still where the magic happens. Most significantly, thanks to creating the magazine, I was fortunate enough to discover the concept of Slow Media which, I firmly believe, is the future of the internet. But let’s begin where one shall begin — at the beginning.
It was a cold December night and I was walking out the door at a friend’s house party. As I launched Uber app on my phone trying to get a lift home, a fellow Slovakian stopped me. He didn’t notice I was on my way out and opened up his heart right there. He went on about an idea of starting a Slovakian version of Humans of New York. Simplistic as it sounded at first, I was instantly curious to see where this could go in so far as creating things I personally felt would be great — turning Slovakia into a more positive, open-minded and inspired place. Whilst getting in a cab, I pushed my business card into his hand and suggested that we talked more over coffee someday. I thought I’d never see the guy again.
David, who turned out to be an aspiring young photographer and I did meet for that coffee. Three months later in March 2015 we launched an online magazine Odviati.com [odd-vya-tee], also loosely translated as “Blown away”. Our shared mission was to bring stories of Slovaks living worldwide to people back in Slovakia.
There were two things that helped us shape this concept, also slightly differing from the HONY mentioned above. First, living amongst the expat community for many years, I was always astonished to see just how much people cared about their home country and how open they were to sharing their knowledge and experience. Second, growing up in Slovakia, which recently transitioned from a communist regime to democracy, I wouldn’t be the only person to describe it as a country with a homogenous belief system and culture, inhabited by people fearing the new and the unknown. Yet, the country has been home to some kind of revolt that’s been bubbling up beneath the surface and therefore, we saw an appetite for a change. A challenge to tackle was on the table. How to really help that change happen?
After a bit of initial research, we understood that if we wanted to have at least a slight pass at making the kind of impact we envisioned, the stories needed to be genuine and real. Investing effort in production and delivery wasn’t an option, it was a must.
This ambition resulted in (1) featuring our friends and people we knew had interesting things to say to begin with, and (2) including our audience in the experience. Here, I’m not talking about interacting with people on a Facebook fan page. Rather, it was all about opening up the very nature of the project to others. We created ‘send us a tip’ feature to nominate a person people though was worth talking to and ‘join us’ option inviting bloggers and editors to take part in the adventure with us. These are the two most prominent calls to action on our page. Thanks to them, another great thing happened.
As far as the content creation and delivery job goes, the objective was to bring the energy of the person we interviewed as close as possible to the reader — in order for the reader to identify with the story. This might sound like some really basic stuff if you studied writing and storytelling, but we never did, so we just went for it the way we felt was right and then made adjustments based on our readers’ responses.
First of all, a no brainer for us was to do all interviews and write all stories in Slovak. Not because Slovaks wouldn’t understand English. Reading a story of an ambitious young woman from a neighbouring town who traveled, has knowledge to share and is in a position to challenge you goes down way better when you see her speaking your native language. It is common knowledge for role models to have the most impact when we share some characteristics with them. Linguistic and cultural backgrounds are a big part of this.
Another challenge was augmenting the energy of the talk so closely that people reading the stories felt like they were sitting right there, next to the interviewee with us. We wanted to produce an online experience that would be just as good as chatting to a friend in your living room or in a cafe. A couple of things helped us here and that’s where the quality of content production comes into play. We interviewed people in person and captured high quality photographs during the interviews. We encouraged the interviewees to suggest a place for our interviews, which might have been their favourite spot to relax, their workplace or anywhere they felt good. Many of them were excited about this idea and them feeling comfy during our meeting really came through in the final product. Quite importantly, we never rehearsed any of the interviews and we’d only really send some sample questions over when a public figure was being interviewed. We did, however, always allow for people to read the final draft of the story before publication to avoid any false facts going out. We never advertised on our website to encourage alertness and attention given to reading. Unpolluted authenticity was the key.
Today, it’s been one year since David and I met. Odviati really took off and we managed to meet lots of amazing people including Iveta Radicova, Slovakia’s (female!) ex-prime minister living in Berlin, and Michal Yaksha Novotny, a Vietnamese Slovakian creative producer, who I interviewed in New York. These were amongst my favourites. Here are some shots from our interviews. [my post continues underneath]
I had so much fun traveling, hearing what people had to say, working through their stories and discussing them with our readers that I realised what a world of difference that made to the way I viewed online media. Living in an information age is great if you’re a computer and can store and process massive amounts of data. For us humans, the way news and other media content is served feels like we were given tools to receive the information and to share it at best; but, there are no comprehensive means helping us to actually make sense out of all that shit overload that runs through our Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines every day. All we’re left with is fear of missing out and distraction from what’s really important in our lives. After realising this , I decided to leave Facebook and I’ve never done anything as effortlessly. It was a difficult and long decision process though, since majority of Odviati’s traffic comes through Facebook — because that’s simply where people hang out in Slovakia. Luckily for me, David agreed to managing our presence there.
Odviati became more than just an online magazine, it turned into a movement. We received offers from other media that syndicate content and are still riding the ‘chasing the clicks wave’ and plenty of positive (and constructive) feedback from our readers. It’s been an incredibly humbling and enlightening experiment for me. I became a consumer of my own produce. It tremendously helped me become better at my daily job as a product manager at Made by Many too. I began focusing more on the psychology of the internet for it is a reflection of today’s humankind, and it’s doing so in an incredibly particular way. Just think about how it lets us create whole new identities, completely independent from our physical ones, and how concepts like the Silk Road, where the idea of identity takes on a completely different spin, challenge everything we were ever comfortable with. With my never ending naivety I like to believe that the future of the internet will indeed be a more honest one, enriching one and, most of all, that it will get away from the ‘scratching the itch’ fashion. But just in case it doesn’t, don’t forget — the offline world is still where the magic happens ;)
If you’d like to learn more about the Slow Media, all you need to start with is in The Slow Media Manifesto.
