Your attention is precious and probably one of the most valuable things you have. I’m not just saying it’s valuable in the sense that attention to articles like this one contributes to the well-being of online publishers and freelance journalists in an economic sense (but, everyone! Thank you for coming here).
No, what I mean is that your attention is precious in that human consciousness, your consciousness, is a profound miracle. You are a collection of atoms that can think. decide What should I think? What you pay attention to shapes what you think and ultimately how you interact with the world in tangible ways.
Therefore, it’s important to be intentional when deciding what to pay attention to. And part of deciding what to pay attention to is deciding what to ignore.recent episodes never post, a really good podcast about the Internet that you should subscribe to, featured a conversation about this. Podcaster Hans Buetow interviewed academic Stefan Lewandowski, co-author of the paper “Critical Neglect as a Core Competence of Digital Citizenship.” From the summary:
Low-quality and misleading information online can often arouse curiosity, anger, anger, and steal people’s attention. To resist certain types of information and actors online, we need to develop new mental habits to avoid being seduced by attention-grabbing or potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the capacity for critical neglect, choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacity.
There’s something intuitive about this, especially for someone who grew up in a culture where clichés like “knowledge is power” are thrown around. Isn’t it good to pay attention to as many things as possible and know as much as possible? Lewandowski said on the podcast that there is a limit to how many things you can pay attention to in a meaningful way. “Only by ignoring things can you actually focus on other things and process them until you actually understand them,” he says.
What does this mean exactly? It depends on your values and what you want to know, but let’s use this election year as an example. Over the next few months, you’ll be bombarded with articles and videos that demand your attention, but only a few will be of value. Part of being an active and effective citizen in today’s online ecosystem is deciding which articles and videos to ignore.
Create a system to determine what to ignore
I’ve created my own personal rules to figure out how to do this. I’ve found that politics involves combat-based verbs, such as when supposed good people “blow up,” “eliminate,” or “massacre” supposed bad people. We found that articles were less likely to contain useful summaries of their policies. the problem at hand.
Instead, I try to read articles that discuss how different choices made by governments affect people. I feel the same way about articles that talk about “how voters will react” to something. Such articles rarely explain the more substantive policy issues at issue.
I’m not saying you should apply the same rules and ignore the same things as I do. After all, we all have different interests. What I’m saying is that part of navigating the online world is deciding what to ignore, and everyone can benefit from practicing this skill. is. Perhaps for you, that means ignoring all the things on social media that are upsetting people or that seem more interested in provoking than understanding.
To quote Lewandowski again:
…In order to gain knowledge, you must be able to concentrate on something. And if you’re so overwhelmed with information that you can’t pay proper attention to anything, you’re not gathering knowledge. It’s just collecting random noise.
There’s a lot of noise out there and it’s only going to get louder. We all need to get better at ignoring things.
