How I Learned to Ignore the Worst of the Internet
Your attention is valuable—it may be one of the most valuable things you have. I don’t mean value in the sense that your attention to articles like this contributes financially to the well-being of online publishers and freelance journalists (though I am grateful you’re here).
No, what I mean is that your attention is valuable because human consciousness—your consciousness—is a profound miracle. You are a collection of atoms capable of thinking and also deciding what to think about. The things you pay attention to tangibly shape what you think about and, ultimately, how you interact with the world.
Therefore, it is important to be conscious about deciding what to pay attention to. And part of deciding what to pay attention to is deciding what to ignore. A recent episode of Never Post , an extremely good Internet podcast that you should definitely subscribe to , featured a conversation on this topic. Podcaster Hans Bütow interviewed academic Stefan Lewandowski, co-author of the article Critical Ignoring as a Core Competency for Digital Citizens . From the annotation:
Low-quality and misleading information on the Internet can distract people’s attention, often causing curiosity, outrage or anger. Resisting certain types of information and entities online requires people to develop new mental habits that help them resist the temptation of attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the ability to critically ignore—to choose what to ignore and where to direct one’s limited attentional capacities.
There’s something intuitive about this, especially if you grew up in a culture that bombarded you with clichés like “knowledge is power.” Isn’t it better to pay attention to as many things as possible and know as many things as possible? In the podcast, Lewandowski says there’s a limit to how many things you can meaningfully pay attention to. “Only by ignoring things can you really focus on other things and process them to the point where you actually understand,” he says.
What does this mean exactly? It depends on your values and what you want to know about, but let’s take an election year as an example. There will be a ton of articles and videos clamoring for your attention in the coming months, but only a few are worth checking out. In our current online ecosystem, being an active and capable citizen means deciding which articles and videos to ignore.
Create a system for determining what to ignore.
I’ve developed my own rules on how to do this. I have found that any policy article that contains fighting verbs, where a supposedly good person “blows up,” “wipes out,” or “destroys” a supposedly bad person, is unlikely to contain a useful statement of policy. the problem is at hand.
Instead, I try to read articles that discuss how various government decisions can affect people. I feel the same way about articles that talk about “how voters will react” to something—such articles rarely help explain the larger political issues at stake.
I’m not saying you should apply the same rules and ignore the same things that I do – after all, we all have different interests. I’m just saying that part of navigating the online world is deciding what to ignore, and that we could all benefit from practicing this skill. Perhaps for you this means ignoring anything that gets people furious on social media, or articles that seem more interesting to read than to understand.
To quote Lewandowski again:
…to gain knowledge, you need to be able to focus on something. And if you’re so overwhelmed with information that you can’t pay enough attention to anything, well, then you’re not collecting knowledge. You’re just collecting random noise.
There’s a lot of noise out there, and it’s only going to get louder. We all need to get better at ignoring things.