💾 Archived View for rosenzweig.io › gemlog › 2020-11-03-gemini-day-4.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 01:18:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I feel the urge to read the news on two fronts:
I'll glide over the former. I haven't read the news since starting my Gemini experiment. What am I missing? Anything of substance will reveal itself in a barrage of emails/texts/gemlogs. Hitting Ctrl-R a thousand times won't matter. Am I failing my "civic duty" to stay informed by intentionally disconnecting? No, that would require the 24 hour news cycle to provide civic value. Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" asks: when has the morning news changed your plans for that afternoon?
As for egoism, a trance reading about foreign politicians is less compelling than the trance from reading about your own work.
Distraction looms after the spotlight, an obsession with page views acute even relative to daily digital junk food. Beyond the time drain is the insatiable need to read every comment, even the vapid remarks by anonymous authors with nothing but personal attacks and slurs. My brain says I "have" to know.
I don't have to know.
So why read, if I don't have to, don't want to, and much wished I did not? Information glut is a predisposition for self-destructive walks down the eleventh page of search results for my name.
Then again, why search at all? Perhaps to track references for `media.txt`, a file I bootstrapped the linked file to estimate Wikipedia notability. I probably am [citation needed], but I doubt anyone would start an article on me which is itself a test of notability [dubious - discuss].
Listing of significant references, otherwise called `ego.txt`
That's a silly reason to search myself. Beyond the egoism and vanity, it only catalogues _significant_ sources, which are sparse enough that monthly maintainence would suffice. More importantly, there is no excuse to read comments sections, nor insignificant sources. The obsession then is one of information glut and egoism, struggles prompting this week's challenge: don't pay attention to the attention.
This afternoon I blogged about a project milestone. There's already noise on Twitter. Tomorrow Reddit will probably join in.
I don't want to know.
I haven't looked, and I do not intend to. It's irrelevant to my life. I'll be better off if I don't know, a foreign proposition in today's self-centered attention-hogging web.
There is no life-changing discussions in the comments section of a post linking to my blog post; relevant comments come through email or IRC. "The medium is the message", after all.
If anyone has topical comments about Panfrost, feel free to email. But if people are speculating about my gender identity or religion?
I won't know.
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I would put the aforementioned post on my gemlog proper, but CAPCOM is pleasantly noncommercial and I don't want to disrupt that with stuff from $DAYJOB, even if I am super passionate about what I do :-)
(If people do want this sort of content on Geminispace proper, feel free to yell at me on email)