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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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When I was around 17 years old I came across the term 'intellectual self-defence' in some of the earliest readings that politicised me and helped encourage me to cultivate a critical disposition towards the social structures and information structures around me (n.b. for context, when I was 17 this was a few years before any of the big social media networks were a thing - let's say around a decade or so into the existence of HTTP).
I haven't been posting on Gemini lately. I'm still impressed by the protocol and the potential of the community here, but I'm less certain that content creation is something I want to be doing so regularly. Beyond that, I'm also less certain that 'content', as such, is the answer; I think perhaps what we need more of in this moment is context. What I'm certain I do want to be doing is adjusting my disposition towards content consumption in line with that radical political sentiment that resonated with me when I first encountered it (intellectual self-defence). And I've been making moves to do that a little bit more through, firstly, disconnecting, and secondly through reconnecting with a different and hopefully improved stance/recipience to the media I'm consuming.
In a practical sense, this disconnecting has been getting off many social networks and "content for content's sake", and also trying to change the balance in how I am spending computer/digital/media time (tipping the balance towards intentionality whilst maintaining some space for fun/floating that can be good for headspace from time to time (e.g. a browse of Amfora with a morning coffee, or some media entertainment my partner and I enjoy)).
I'm not and never have been a fan of the 'surfing' element of the Web/Net - floating between content/stuff. I actually find it kind-of frustrating. In an age in which the database is such a fundamental cultural object, and in such widespread use, I find it absurd how lacking the popular 'Net is in terms of its ability to function - from the point of view of the technicity of 'the query' (e.g. the structured query) - as a great wealth of items reducible, and searchable, as data, but instead how search/content/streams function more as a bombardment or intrusion of attention-seeking commercial or propaganda noise. And if I'm honest I'm not sure that the "go forth and create content!" tendency that I feel is associated even with many aspects of the 'Net I *like* (including the smolnet) is really such a great thing after all. That is, I'm not sure if *more content* is the answer. For me, at least. (n.b. said in full awareness that this is in the context of an item of... content).
I've adjusted my own habits. And this adjustment has had a huge impact on both my wellbeing and also my daily experience of the media I consume; the media I criticise, the media I'm sceptical about, the media I learn from, and the media that informs my actions. In a practical sense, I've returned to RSS. I spent some time looking into self-hosted RSS solutions and ultimately decided on FreshRSS, which I initially set up as an experiment on a local NAS server to run for a little while - and I've now ultimatley moved this over to a personal VPS where I've sync'd to it from both mobile and laptop devices and put some limitation in the number of articles to prevent an unnecessary dearth of information.
The integration of self-hosted RSS with newsboat in particular has made my consumption of media fundamentally more structured and streamlined, and ultimately allows me to be more informed whilst not getting lost in the surf. Engaging with my own list of subscriptions through a minimal interface such as Newsboat, I try to force back onto the Web/Net the qualities that I think should be more part of our everyday user-experience on the surface of our interfaces: the ability to search for the right information, to interrogate the source/author/platform, to slip fully beneath the advertising, tracking, demographic segmentation or the algorithms that 'serve' the surf on the surface web. Through newsboat, I aggregate only what I need to, and the keyboard-only STDIN and simplified output of plaintext, combined with features like Newsboat's search function, makes the ability to choose to engage with a great number of articles, and/or discover useful articles on a given topic, from across a range of different sources, much more feasible (and much less meandering and time-draining than Web searches and the clunkyness of visual design differences on the modern Web, when trying to access the more raw material of information).
Managing a series of selected RSS feeds is also a kind-of discipline. Too many and you're just drowning in content. Too few and I find I'm not pulling in a broad enough range to be able to discover what I want to of, e.g. what's happening in the world, or within a given subject area, etc. I've gone through phases previously of trying to engage with content via RSS but never found the sweet spot of the right sources. Perhaps now I'm a bit more tuned into myself and have a sense of the sources/people I want to hear from, this time around I've pulled together a good master list that pours into a handful of categories that are of interest to me:
That's it.
From those categories, and through using both newsboat and my mobile reader (connected via API to my FreshRSS instance), I've adjusted habits or processes more akin to being flung around or floating in media, to being in control, minimal, and having the clarity of engagement to be able to pick apart the media that comes my way. Previously, I'd wake up and often scroll a mainstream news website on my phone, or rely on a sense of news from the periphery of trusted social media sources. But now, I get just a couple of sync updates a day, and I'm finding I spend far less time just checking if there's anything of interest - and anything I need to be informed about, reading or pocketing those items, and coming out on the other side much less like I've been bombarded or thrown about in an ocean of content.
This was a term I originally encountered in the work of Noam Chomsky - one of the key figures whose work and engagement with the world was an early gateway for my own politicisation. I don't believe Chomsky meant intellectual self-defence was purely about media engagement. I think his sense of the concept that it was much broader than that; more a kind-of model of social life. But I believe that if information is at the heart of so much social/community/political life, then an intentionality around this information, this media, is key.
There's more I'd like to explore around the computational or context-focused approach to media cultures that I'd like to see more of in future, but maybe that's a conversation for another time.
I hope this post has been of interest to some. I'd v.much encourage anyone out there who may feel the same pang of frustration that I do when being caught up in the 'surf' of information to instead explore disconnecting and reconnecting with a renewed sense of intentionality - perhaps through a solution like managed feeds/subscriptions, or any other method you have to stay plugged in to useful information whilst not getting caught in the waves.