Digital Waldenponding (and my reading strategy)
(Pandemic Diary - day 282)
From my journal: 5 December 2020 (Saturday)
Venkatesh Rao for the win, again.
In the Breaking Smart newsletter this morning, he referred to one of his old posts (from 2018) that gives his argument against digital Waldenponding, and it’s quite compelling. In fact it might be exactly the concept I’ve needed to find. It might even be the approach I’ve already stumbled my way into, the one that feels right and that I’ve suspected is right. I just hadn’t quantified or qualified in this way.
One of his basic ideas is that there is nothing innately wrong with the information flow we’re exposed to, that in fact it’s almost our duty as humans to play our small role in the emerging greater cloud intelligence. (I’m not sure I’m sold on that part of his argument, but the rest stands without it, anyway.)
Unplugging from the flow is not the answer, he says — that will just leave you uneducated and out of touch. Instead, embrace the flow, but become better at handling it.
He uses a chart to depict the range of that flow, incorporating the small-minds/great-minds scale (small minds talk about people, great minds talk about ideas) on one axis, and the “latency” of the material on the other axis. There’s an “attention-management turnpike” rising across the chart, traveling through both small-mind/low-latency content (Twitter, talk radio, etc) and great-minds/generational-latency content (and everything in between). The idea is that it’s important to spend time on the entire highway, that there is nothing wrong with spending some time in the low-latency, small-mind part of it, as long as you don’t stay there, as long as you also spend time at the other end of the turnpike.
Back in March of this year I started to draft my “Reading Manifesto” where I talked about reading broadly, and of my target practice of alternating between books I want to read and books I should read. I didn’t include reading from my Facebook feed in that recipe, but it fits, and I think I’ve known that it fits.
He talks about being able to move freely along that highway, and I pulled this great quote: “A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book.” And this: “stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded twitter gossip about people. Strength train to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.” That’s where I want to be.
“A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book.”
I’ve known that instinctively and I’ve been working on it for myself, without having a name for the concept. I’ve been doing that alternation in my book selection. I’ve narrowed my physical magazine subscriptions down to a small, but diverse and high quality, set that I read every issue of. I’ve not withdrawn from Facebook, but I’ve tried (with varying degrees of success) to be moderate, while also making sure I have a diverse collection of people in my feed.
So, time to go back to my Reading Manifesto. But an expanded version of this also fits into a more comprehensive strategy for dealing with the superabundance of nearly everything that we’re experiencing (and having trouble with).