Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.
Austin Kleon, Keep Going
Working on a newsletter a few weeks back, I came across a paper on Critical Ignoring as a required skill for digital information literacy.
Critical ignoring is a type of deliberate ignorance used to filter and block information so a person can reduce their exposure to irrelevant or inaccurate information. It involves redesigning the choice architecture used to engage with the internet, using outside references to validate the quality of information by a source (instead of looking only at the source itself), and disengaging from bad actors.
Why work on intentionally ignoring information? Cited in the paper:
When the world comes to people filtered through digital devices, there is no longer a need to decide what information to seek. Instead, the relentless stream of information has turned human attention into a scarce resource to be seized and exploited by advertisers and content providers. Investing effortful and conscious critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place means that one’s attention has already been expropriated.
M. Caulfield, Recalibrating our approach to misinformation.
There aren’t any easy answers to how to avoid falling down useless rabbit holes on the internet, especially when lead down them by emotional manipulation. But this paper does connect with a lot of other best practices and puts into focus the idea that the goal shouldn’t be to optimize your information consumption, but to make choices that support the things you already want to do so that you can avoid being redirected from what you value.
This Builds Character 