I’ve been thinking a lot about both pace and curation over the past few months and have decided that I need to slow down so I can keep making these posts every week. I’m more interested in having a tighter focus around what I choose to share at this point. I’m also becoming interested in revisiting older links from the archives and doing deeper dives into some of the themes I visit and revisit each week.

Emotional Overdrive

The past year saw an intensification of both pace and rhetoric, and combined with sheer prurient interest, news has become intellectually exhausting. This, even after only a year, is now familiar. Yet something we are still just beginning to grapple with is the persistent emotional drag to this steady stream of information, and it is made all the worse by the demand that one emotionally comport oneself to the news, showily demonstrating one’s identity through an orientation to the latest story. It is stressful, no doubt, but when news becomes a flood of not just data, but affect, there is more at stake than frustration.
Here’s how this golden age of speech actually works:

In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.
“WARNING: This website is not real and your species has not evolved to process this much garbage at once. Get off now and make your day what you want it to be.”
The Follower Factory Yeah, there’s a lot to make fun of in this article, but I found a lot to think about, too. And the visualizations are cool.