The internet used to be a wonderful place. For those of us who grew up in that sweet spot between the analogue and early digital days, with slam books, DVDs and iPods on one hand, and Facebook, Askfm and early Instagram on the other, existing online was full of possibilities. But if there’s anything we’ve learned since the inception of the technofascist hellscape we call the infinite scroll today, it’s that whatever is good and free and fun in this world will be stolen, razed and enshittified back to us. Sam Altman, founder of ChatGPT, has declared a price rate on our intelligence, so the time isn’t far till we are mandated to pay a brain tax.
In an environment like this, where we’ve practically spent the last few years aggressively inundated by screens and their outsized ubiquity in every aspect of our lives, it would make sense that we are now forgoing them wholly through digital detoxes and frictionmaxxing. However, with the way our lives and careers are structured, it has perhaps proven harder to give up social media entirely or at all. Like most modern inventions have made it, we are incapable of going back to a time before the internet because of our total dependence on it. As Cal Newport writes in his book Digital Minimalism, “People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.”
There’s no denying that scrolling is incredibly satisfying. There’s a reason we do it for hours every day instead of all the other things we want or have to do: scrolling eases the texture of reality for the duration we perform it. Our attention, as a result, undergoes routine degeneration, with companies using every tool in the rulebook to control it. But what if we could reduce the surface area of the digital range across which our attention routinely roams? We would notice that our attention is not only able to expand across but can also contract within.
The name for one such culling process is digital gardening. The concept refers to a unique space that you create intentionally for yourself with things that are specific to your interests, as opposed to the algorithmic space where your interests are generated and defined by platform profits. “Most of what we do on the internet is zombie entertainment; we consume from a firehose feed with no intentionality,” says Sari Azout, founder of Sublime, a knowledge management app. The agenda of making a digital garden is simple. If our attention is stretched thin in a space that is vast and out of our control, we create a space of our own that is manageable and within our control.
Here’s the idea: take a platform of your choice that has a lot of blank space for you to fill with things, be it an anonymous social media account, the Notes app or even a physical notebook. It is important for this to exist between private browsing and curated performance. On your next scrolling session, if something sparks an interest, don’t stop at saving the reel—transfer it to your space of choice, either by writing it down or pasting it in your Notes app, mark it with a heading that denotes your interest, and if you’re feeling especially inspired, record what moved you in the moment. If you do this for the next ten things you see, you will notice patterns forming between disparate subjects and can thus draw connections between them. For example, I’ve really gotten into note-taking recently and I’m always on the lookout for different ways, devices, occasions and uses of taking spontaneous notes. Since I’m currently attuned to this way of thinking, I record anything interesting I come across in relation to note-taking and, in the process, have found books by Joan Didion and Susan Sontag who kept similar journals. I’ve even discovered journaling and annotating methods like mind mapping, interstitial journaling and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, all of which enable me to pay closer attention to a specific subject that reinforces my interest rather than only remembering it when the algorithm shows it to me.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
