How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention
RSS brings me weirder and deeper stuff than I encounter on social media
I’ve written a bunch about “rewilding your attention” — or, spending more time reading and viewing culture that isn’t going viral on social-media feeds.
Algorithmically-sorted feeds are good for some things. They let you know what are the big, popular conversations of the day, which is valuable! But if you stare at ’em too much, it’s intellectual monocropping. All you wind up knowing (and thinking about) are the same things everyone else knows and is thinking about.
So it’s also important to rewild your mind — to cultivate your own quirky, overgrown, weedy garden of culture.
Cool. But: How do you find such material?
I’ve written a few pieces suggesting different techniques, which you can read here. But today I wanted to drill down into the most important way I diversify the material I read, which is …
… using an “RSS reader”.
An RSS reader is at heart pretty simple: It’s a piece of software that lets you “follow” blogs and web sites. Whenever…
