đ Attention is All You Have
Alice Girard Guittard:
Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
You didnât really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didnât update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90sâŚ
Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video.
The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but itâs not very hard to find. After all youâre on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.
I was lucky enough to grow up alongside the Internet. RFC 791âthe one that defines IPv4âwas published the same month I was born. When I was growing up, the only option was to be intentional when using the computer, so that's what I learned to do. I loved it.
By the time big and popular social media came around it was so different from my tried-and-true approach that it never really stuck. Sure, I've dabbled with social media over the years, but my use and engagement have always been low.
I prefer things like RSS feeds, newsletters, and Tumblr (which is, I guess, technically social media in its own unique way) over anything with an algorithmic feed. To put it another way, I prefer to select who has access to my time and attention instead of letting an algorithmic feed wash over me.
To be clear, I don't think algorithmic feeds are all bad. They can be quite useful for discovering new and interesting things, but you have to be careful about the algorithms you trust (which are few and far between these days) and use them in moderation. Given when and how I grew upâspending a lot of time on the computerâthat's easy for me, but it's not easy for a lot of people with different experience, like a lot of people younger than me. I mean, hell, a lot of those folks probably don't even realize there are other options.
That's a shame. A lot of people would benefit from being more intentional when using their computers, phones, and the Internet, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits when the algorithms are so compelling. Sometimes you get lucky and the algorithm surfaces some great stuff, but those algorithms have their own agendas, and those agendas do not have your best interests at heart.
Being a passenger can be fun, but there's a lot of amazing stuff out there you'll never find if you don't spend some time in the driver's seat.