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."
Found this from a post on 'Rewilding' by Clive Thompson.
As guilty as anyone else of endlessly scrolling my social media feeds, reading this reminded me that my most creative, imaginative moments, my biggest, wildest, most deliciously ambitious thoughts, always come to me in moments of disconnection and rest. Moments of reconnection with myself, instead of plugging into the digital matrix where Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, LinkedIn and all my apps' algorithmic understanding of who I am, and what I care about, feels so reductive. Clive talks about how he is so much quirkier than what his apps understand him to be; his interests and curiosities extend so far beyond what his digital diet feeds him, or even what he himself puts out as content or his virtual personality.
I related strongly to that; I imagine so will pretty much all of us. As someone trained in technology, I build and think about it in my work hours, but I'm also someone that loves to sing eastern classical and play the harmonium, I'm a space nerd, I'm the aunt of an 8-year old that I do virtual art dates with, and who is learning about feminism from me (she calls it "fenimism" and I don't want to correct her). I'm a recently-moved New Yorker, excited to explore the old and new of my Brooklyn neighborhood these days. I am learning to turn my doodles into illustrations, I write poems I'm too shy to share, I fume on whatsapp groups with female friends about the exhaustion of being a woman, I love discovering new, independent publications of long essays about mundane, everyday objects and emotions, I listen to podcasts on culture and society and got inspired to start my own, sometimes I organize human rights protests, I think endlessly about leadership, I go into rabbit-holes of my academic friends' research on things like antimicrobial resistance and authoritarianism...
...the point is, what user profile algorithm can ever hope to capture even a fraction of our fullness? And when we let our devices feed us all our content, how much of our brains are limited to the narrow alleyways defined for us by their curations? How much of our creative energy and imagination are we stifling?
Here's to 'rewilding' my imagination. To reconnecting more frequently with my inner world and passions, which are richer, wilder and more beautiful than anything I can find out there.
