Fighting Digital Distraction
Digital Literacy means having the power to resist the attention economy, taking our focus back, and producing rather than consuming.
Folksonomies: attention economy digital distractions digital literacy
Memes
05 JAN 2023
Identifying AI Online
Before you continue, pause and consider: How would you prove you're not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can't? 1. Triangulate objective reality [...] This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive. Language models can decently mim...Folksonomies: ai auto-generated content
Folksonomies: ai auto-generated content
There are additional tactics for differentiating ourselves from AIs, but the first two were the most interesting to me.
05 JAN 2023
Web Gardens and Streams Elaborated
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space. Caufield's main argument was that we have become swept away by streams – the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events. The conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and...Folksonomies: web topology digital distraction
Folksonomies: web topology digital distraction
05 JAN 2023
The Garden and the Stream as Metaphors for WWW
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens. The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relat...Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
The author will later call the memex the original garden.
19 NOV 2022
Critical Ignoring and Deliberate Ignorance
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We ...An important educational paradigm.
08 JAN 2018
Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming
The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. [...] But there's something else that being a producer do...08 JAN 2018
Our Life is What We Pay Attention To
When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all...21 NOV 2017
Inversion of Information and Attention
What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an in...References
05 JAN 2023
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Appleton, Maggie (20230101), The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI, Retrieved on 2023-01-05Source Material [maggieappleton.com]
Folksonomies: ai generated content
Folksonomies: ai generated content
05 JAN 2023
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Appleton, Maggie (2020), A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, Retrieved on 2023-01-05Source Material [maggieappleton.com]
Folksonomies: digital distraction digital gardens
Folksonomies: digital distraction digital gardens
05 JAN 2023
The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Caufield, Mike (October 2015), The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, Retrieved on 2023-01-05Source Material [hapgood.us]
19 NOV 2022
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
Periodicals>Journal Article: Kozyreva, Wineburg, Hertwig (November 8, 2022), Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Retrieved on 2022-11-19Source Material [journals.sagepub.com]
08 JAN 2018
Start Every Day as a Producer, Not a Consumer
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Johnson, Clay (2/23/2012), Start Every Day as a Producer, Not a Consumer, Retrieved on 2018-01-08Source Material [lifehacker.com]
Folksonomies: productivity
Folksonomies: productivity
08 JAN 2018
The Great Attention Heist
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Bell, John and Zada, (JANUARY 1, 2018), The Great Attention Heist, LA Review of Books, Retrieved on 2018-01-08Source Material [lareviewofbooks.org]
21 NOV 2017
Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: GALLAGHER, BRIAN (SEPTEMBER 21, 2017), Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will, Retrieved on 2017-11-21Source Material [nautil.us]