A Quick Primer on “Rewilding Your Attention”
Highlights from my Medium Day talk on how I decouple my brain from social-media feeds
For two years now I’ve been working on strategies to “rewild my attention”.
What precisely is rewilding one’s attention? It’s about spending less time clicking on stuff that big-tech algorithms push in our direction — and more time cultivating a weirder, more idiosyncratic media landscape.
As I first wrote about his in 2021 …
If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence. [snip]
Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.
I’m a science journalist (and science nerd in general), so I love the life-sciences metaphor here, the mind as a garden. And, in an aspect fractal of the very idea of rewilding, I didn’t…
