The blogging world is like a pressure cooker
I guess the feeling that 'everything keeps going faster' isn't a very new or spectacular one: I often feel that way in our current time, but my grandmother probably thought the same fifty years ago. I once read this book by a Dutch scientist called 'Why everything goes faster when you're growing older', and as far as I remember it had something to do with the fact that when you're a kid, everything you experience is new and impressive and therefore time seems to go slow, while once you grow older, you keep experiencing more or less similar things, which are less impressive and therefore seem to go faster. So the experienced time seems to go faster than the 'real time'.
But sometimes the opposite can also be the case: a lot of time seems to have passed, while something only happened yesterday or the week before that. I guess this is how I often experience the things I learn and find in the design blogging world: when I see things a few times on a few different blogs, it often feels as though I've known them for a long time. And when I then see the same items pop up in a magazine a few months later, I may easily think: 'Hey, isn't that old news? I've known this for ages!'
I definitely believe that blogs cause a certain acceleration in the rise of trends and innovation: they spread easier, but age easier too. And though I basically enjoy seeing new things regularly, I think the 'easy aging' part is the reverse of this quick spreading of new things.
I realized this a few days ago when I was in a bookstore. I saw two books that had been on my wish list for a while: Flea Market style ('Als nieuw', in Dutch) by Emily Chalmers, Ali Hanan & Debi Treloar and Bazaar Style by Selina Lake, Joanna Simmons & Debi Treloar. I had both books in my hands, when I started hesitating. Hadn't I already seen too many of the images from these books in magazines and on blogs? Shouldn't I go for some more recent, up to date publications, that hadn't been featured everywhere already? Maybe these two were a bit outdated...
Then I looked at the publishing dates of both books and noticed that Flea Market Style was a few years old (from 2005) indeed, but Bazaar Style was only published in 2008, which means it can't be much more than a year old...
I was really surprised that something so new -I mean: what's one year old for a good book?- could already seem so old to me. Flipping through the pages learnt me that the books definitely weren't outdated and were filled with inspiration and innovative ideas: they weren't less innovative cause the books were a few years old. It made me realize how quickly we (or at least I) want change and new things, which is a little ironic when it comes to buying books that are about 'recycle style'. Maybe it's not that bad to step outside that pressure cooker once in a while...
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