A Quick Primer on “Rewilding Your Attention”
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 come up with the phrase “rewilding your attention”: It was a coinage of Tom Critchlow’s that I stumbled upon while reading the personal blog of CJ Eller. Meta!
Cool — but how precisely do you rewild your attention?
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