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9 Ways to ‘Rewild Your Attention’
How to inject more weirdness and randomness into the stuff you read and see
Back in August, I wrote about the concept of “rewilding your attention” — why it’s good to step away from the algorithmic feeds of big social media.
I’d originally encountered the idea via a tweet by Tom Critchlow, referencing a post by CJ Eller, riffing off an essay by Ali Montag. You can go read my original essay, but basically the concept was that the algorithms in big-tech feeds have two problems…
- they focus heavily on the hot viral here-and-now: what highly popular folks are talking and arguing about, this very instant. And they focus on…
- material that’s customized for you — except it’s a dull, Demographics 101 cartoon of who you are and what you’re interested in
Either way, spending too much time in the big algorithmic feeds winds up being a form of intellectual monocropping. It’s not terribly diverse or surprising. It’s not that the stuff in your feeds is all bad; some of it’s great! But it’s got a deadening sameness to it.
So the concept of “rewilding your attention” means actively choosing to poke around elsewhere. As I wrote…
Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the…
