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    143 [151]Culture [152]Featured [153]The Internet
    144 
    145 Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)
    146 
    147   • Post author By [154]Tracy Durnell
    148   • Post date [155]February 23, 2025
    149   • [156]5 Comments on Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)
    150   • ❤️
    151 
    152 This is part five of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and
    153 finding enough. Each post stands alone, so you don’t have to read them all.
    154 Read the introduction on “[157]the mindset of more.”
    155 
    156 Too much info, too fast
    157 
    158 Information has a near-physicality to it — we feel the emotional force of
    159 content. Although the same volume of information is coming into my feed reader
    160 as always, the intensity of the content of late has made it feel like too much.
    161 The perceived speed of my intellectual spaces has increased because so much of
    162 the information I’m exposed to is emotionally distressing. And going too fast
    163 for too long makes me tired — mentally and physically. As someone prone to
    164 anxiety, I need to be conscious of how my body internalizes what I’m reading.
    165 
    166 We feel the emotional intensity of what we read from a feed as speed because it
    167 seems that a large number of consequential things have happened to us in a
    168 short span of time. Caitlin Dewey [158]frames it as being deluged:
    169 
    170     [W]hen it comes to political news… I sometimes feel like I’m standing at
    171     the base of some fucked-up virtual waterfall, with thousands of gallons of
    172     dense, icy water pounding down ceaselessly on my head.
    173 
    174 Our bodies translate our [159]online emotional experiences into physical
    175 realities; our bodies react to what happens in virtual spaces the same way they
    176 react in physical spaces, releasing stress hormones and raising our heart rate
    177 and blood pressure although we’re sitting still. Chronic stress is terrible for
    178 our health. But we wouldn’t spend so much time online if it was only bad – we
    179 also receive mental rewards from gathering information.
    180 
    181 I don’t think withdrawing from information altogether is the answer, but I
    182 wonder whether we can reclaim some agency by changing the places and ways we’re
    183 exposed to information — by controlling our perceived intellectual pace.
    184 
    185 Our intellectual pace is influenced by:
    186 
    187   • the total amount of information we’re exposed to,
    188   • how much of it we actually consume,
    189   • the information’s emotional intensity,
    190   • the place we’re consuming it, and
    191   • whether we feel we can do anything about it.
    192 
    193 Who controls our thinking spaces, controls our pace
    194 
    195 The physical and conceptual spaces where we learn and think comprise our
    196 intellectual environment: the places we read, listen or watch; and the places
    197 where we process what we’ve taken in, whether by talking about it or writing
    198 about it.
    199 
    200 Time is experienced relativistically; some hours feel faster to us than others.
    201 That sensation of where did the time go?! can happen whenever we’re immersed,
    202 whether that’s in flow state, where we are working at our peak ability, or in
    203 social media, where we are fully absorbed in the thoughts of others. These
    204 types of fast-felt experiences sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of agency.
    205 
    206 When we lack control in our intellectual environments, our mindspaces are not
    207 our own. Matt Haig argues in Notes on a Nervous Planet, “The trouble is that if
    208 we are plugged in to a vast nervous system, our happiness—and misery—is more
    209 collective than ever. The group’s emotions become our own.”
    210 
    211 Our thoughts become dominated by others’ concerns and priorities if we cannot
    212 regulate the pace at which we receive them — if we never have time to process
    213 them. And given our finite schedules, there’s often an inverse relationship
    214 between the time we spend consuming and the time we spend thinking about it.
    215 
    216 Dewey [160]summarizes the impact of the explosion of news sources and the
    217 never-ending sensationalized feed:
    218 
    219     “Together, these forces have both accelerated and flattened the news:
    220     Everything happens all at once, and everything is a crisis.”
    221 
    222 Controlling the pace of media becomes a tool of power, with political
    223 ramifications. If we’re busy watching, we’re not acting. If we’re stuck
    224 listening, we’re not thinking. If we’re not sure what’s happening, we’ll wait
    225 to gather more information. If we’re constantly playing catch up, we’re always
    226 in reactive mode, never proactive.
    227 
    228 Right now, the Trump administration is taking advantage of its control of our
    229 attentional spaces to raise our collective mental pace into overdrive. As Ezra
    230 Klein [161]puts it, “The flood is a point. The overwhelm is a point. The
    231 message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the
    232 cumulative effect of all of them.” The hemorrhage of horror is intended to
    233 paralyze us by overloading us with information that we don’t have time to
    234 process.
    235 
    236 But as Craig Mod [162]challenges,
    237 
    238     “The feed, the doomscroll, the hyperventilation, is the heartbeat of
    239     political and social death. It is not life. It is a false heartbeat.”
    240 
    241 Oliver Burkeman [163]encourages us to “make sure your psychological centre of
    242 gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and
    243 friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to
    244 the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global
    245 emergencies.” It is too easy, Burkeman notes, to live “inside the news” rather
    246 than our physical reality. Our tools for accessing our thinking spaces — now
    247 almost all digital — encourage it.
    248 
    249 The web feels infinite
    250 
    251 Nicholas Carr [164]notices how, online and especially on our phones, our
    252 attention transfers from what we’re consuming to how we’re consuming it: “[W]
    253 hat engages us more and more is not the content but the mechanism. […] Whatever
    254 lies on the other side of the interface seems less and less consequential. The
    255 interface is the thing. The interface is the content.” The meta subsumes the
    256 factual. The experience overshadows the information. The interface — and its
    257 speed — are all-consuming.
    258 
    259 We used to use specialized media, Carr points out — playing a song used a
    260 different tool than reading the news — but generalist computers have
    261 consolidated the vast majority of our intellectual environment into digital
    262 devices. We both play music and read the news on our computer, whether that’s a
    263 phone or a desktop PC. A key difference for our experience is that we lost
    264 physical transitions between media.
    265 
    266 Friction reduces speed. Analog media naturally provided friction — you had to
    267 get up to flip the record, you had to go outside to grab the newspaper — while
    268 digital media aims to remove friction from all consumption. The digital format
    269 removed the constraints of physicality; this brought us endless scroll, which
    270 removed a natural cue to transition activities and deprives of the
    271 psychological satisfaction of [165]ever completing anything. Or, as Craig Mod
    272 puts it, [166]edges. Edgeless is endless. Without waypoints, it’s easy to spend
    273 longer than we realize consuming information and moving from one type of
    274 content to another. Without transitions, we exist in an unbroken now that
    275 matches the pace of our intellectual space, whether fast or slow.
    276 
    277 Our fastest space raises our baseline pace
    278 
    279 Spending time in a faster-paced space raises our threshold for stimulus as we
    280 adapt to its speed. I have found that when I dip back from the slow stream into
    281 the fast feed, even with the intention of keeping up with only one or two
    282 people, the speed can suck me in again.
    283 
    284 I tried lurking on Bluesky, but once enough people showed up, it had the same
    285 delicious taste for me as old Twitter… so I logged out in December and haven’t
    286 let myself log back in. A fast-paced environment builds a pattern of
    287 consumption and a habit of speed. For me, it is safer to stay out of the swift
    288 water altogether.
    289 
    290 The mind must convince the body to change
    291 
    292     In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the
    293     discipline to say “no” or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast
    294     proliferation of digital media.
    295 
    296     —[167]L.M. Sacasas
    297 
    298 To lower my pace, I want to take in less information in total. But it’s not as
    299 simple as deciding to take in less information; living that decision is the
    300 hard part. A change like this is not just intellectual, but embodied, too.
    301 
    302 When I was trying to escape Twitter’s staccato mode of thinking, I found my
    303 muscle memory challenged my mental discipline. I could fully intend not to look
    304 at Twitter, but in moments of transition, the habitual movement of my fingers
    305 on the keyboard carried me back again and again, forcing me to exercise [168]my
    306 will continuously. My subconscious urge to fill any gap with stimulus was
    307 powerful. Ultimately, I had to [169]block the site with my Hosts file (and
    308 eventually quit my job where I had to use Twitter 😉). My body resisted my
    309 conscious desire to stop reading Twitter, and I had to change my environment to
    310 force myself to let it go.
    311 
    312 I’m reminded of the Ray Bradbury story [170]Frost and Fire (spoilers for an
    313 eighty year old novella 😉), where people’s lives last mere days — then the main
    314 characters decide to brave the perilous journey to the spaceship their
    315 ancestors left behind. When they enter, their bodies literally slow down, and
    316 the hero believes himself to be dying:
    317 
    318     “The ship he had come to for salvation was now slowing his pulse, darkening
    319     his brain, poisoning him. With a starved, faint kind of expiring terror, he
    320     realized that he was dying.
    321 
    322     […]
    323 
    324     He had a dim sense of time passing, of thinking, struggling, to make his
    325     heart go quick, quick…. to make his eyes focus. But the fluid in his body
    326     lagged quietly through his settling veins and he heard his pulse thud,
    327     pause, thud, pause and thud again with lulling intermissions.
    328 
    329     […]
    330 
    331     Is this death? This slowing of blood, of my heart, this cooling of my body,
    332     this drowsy thinking of thoughts?”
    333 
    334 When he finally recovers from the shock, when he acclimates to the new
    335 slowness, he realizes the ship has saved him: the slower pace means his life
    336 will not end in eight days. The dramatic change in pace felt like dying, so he
    337 fought it, but now that his body is no longer racing, his life is comparably
    338 infinite. Everyone who stayed behind has grown old in the days he took to
    339 adapt.
    340 
    341 I think any sudden change in the pace of our intellectual environment can spark
    342 this same kind of physical shock. At the same time, when we are immersed in the
    343 feed, it can be hard to notice that our pace is wearing us out and recognize
    344 that we have the power to change it.
    345 
    346 We can change our mental — and physical — pace by changing the places where we
    347 spend time: choosing new spaces and shaping the ones we choose. We cannot force
    348 ourselves to change, but we can create environments for ourselves that
    349 encourage and support what we want, and discourage what we don’t want, applying
    350 friction with intention.
    351 
    352 Lowering the pace of my online intellectual spaces
    353 
    354     On the open web, we can choose our own pace of information because we — not
    355     corporations — are in control of our environment.
    356 
    357 Taking in information across a broad spread of paces
    358 
    359 For finding new things to read online, I mainly turn to my feed reader. I also:
    360 
    361   • use the library catalog and Goodreads as [171]browsing-thinking tools,
    362   • get temperature readings from microbloggers on the Fediverse via
    363     micro.blog,
    364   • explore outwards through the open web from articles and personal websites,
    365   • seek answers from DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, and Reddit,
    366   • absorb random facts from YouTubers, and
    367   • probe more widely with Search My Site and Marginalia Search.
    368 
    369 Some of these are fast spaces, some slow; many let me set my own pace. I’ve
    370 corralled most of my media exposure into my feed reader, which helps because I
    371 must choose to open it, and have removed access from my phone. But while I
    372 generally feel [172]RSS is a healthy way to follow writers, it’s still [173]a
    373 feed. And feeds, whether self-curated or assembled by a corporate algorithm,
    374 are designed to be an efficient information delivery mechanism. Their function
    375 is to provide easy, immediate* access to new information.
    376 
    377 *(James built [174]a slow feed reader!)
    378 
    379 Choosing quieter spaces
    380 
    381 One of the dials I think about for media exposure is how much noise I will
    382 tolerate to find signal; accepting more noise means I can find signal from a
    383 broader band. The massive spectrum of information and event-dense experience of
    384 social media creates a noisy intellectual environment. On RSS, I control how
    385 loud my space is, how much chatter I allow in. This intellectual loudness
    386 translates into perceived speed.
    387 
    388 To draw on a wide pool of information and sources, I have for years permitted
    389 my feed reader to be a noisy — thus relatively fast — space. I’ve erred on the
    390 side of subscribing, adding blogs and newsletters to my feed reader with
    391 abandon. The quantity and constant influx of information can impose an
    392 artificial pressure to consume it; the fact that it exists implies we ought to
    393 read it. Granting myself a smaller, tighter pool of reading material to choose
    394 from could make exercising mental discipline easier.
    395 
    396 I am starting to unsubscribe from a few feeds, though I am reluctant to remove
    397 too many 😉 I am thinking of creating a second RSS feed for myself on a
    398 different service, subscribing only to my favorite 20-30 feeds; I can check
    399 that during the week, and on weekends, when I have a bit more capacity, can
    400 take a peek at my full feed to see if there’s anything I missed. (A lot of
    401 times, news seems to play itself out over the span of a week.)
    402 
    403 Using the tools my spaces offer
    404 
    405 I access my online intellectual spaces in my feed reader, read-later app, and
    406 internet browser on my phone and desktop computer. The apps have different
    407 levels of control, as do the devices. My phone opens me up to a world of
    408 distractions with apps as well as access to the open web; my process of reading
    409 only from my read-later app on the phone creates a slower environment even on a
    410 device biased towards speed.
    411 
    412 The overall stimulus we experience in a space influences how fast it feels. Ads
    413 increase visual noise, so [175]I block them on desktop and use DuckDuckGo
    414 browser on mobile, which blocks ads way better than Firefox browser. Color adds
    415 visual stimulation, so I set up the accessibility shortcut on my phone to
    416 toggle me into greyscale mode; if I’m feeling overwhelmed, I can hit that to
    417 instantly drop my pace.
    418 
    419 My current process of [176]selecting and reading at different times, using
    420 different tools, takes advantage of my read later app’s slow environment.
    421 Instapaper doesn’t recommend me a bunch of junk like Pocket did; it’s just my
    422 own stuff. (One of the many reasons I quit Pocket.) Using tags — including a ⭐
    423 tag to mark the things I most want to read — and archiving aggressively
    424 condenses the amount of information I’m exposed to when I open the app even
    425 more.
    426 
    427 I use [177]micro.blog as my most social online space, which I generally look at
    428 once or twice a day for ten minutes (and could get away with even less 😉) I
    429 picked micro.blog as my connection to the Fediverse because it doesn’t show
    430 follower counts or allow reposts (or quote posts, though I personally have
    431 found these useful). It’s a pretty small community, and most people are not
    432 heavy posters. Between the tooling and the number of users, this means the
    433 volume of posts is much lower than Bluesky and corporate silos.
    434 
    435 The feed offers a variety of controls for what I see; I recently muted a few
    436 terms related to the corporate silos and generative AI because these topics
    437 aren’t really beneficial for me to think about. I also appreciate that it
    438 doesn’t have endless scroll, and while you can proceed through a few pages, you
    439 cannot go backwards forever in time. The feed has an end.
    440 
    441 Creating endings
    442 
    443 The web may feel infinite, but we can create spaces within it that feel finite.
    444 
    445 New material constantly flows into my feed reader. Every day, there are 20-50
    446 new posts I could consider reading. In the past several weeks, I’ve started
    447 “marking all as read” in my feed reader after I open anything that looks
    448 interesting, whereas in the past I’d leave it all visible and peruse it a
    449 second or third time.
    450 
    451 I’m also working on leaving fewer tabs open in my phone browser. (I aim for
    452 just one at the end of the day — my weeknotes draft post for easy access
    453 throughout the week — but sometimes that don’t happen 😉) This is a practice in
    454 letting go of what I won’t read or use, in acknowledging my time limitations
    455 and sticking to my own priorities. Especially in the current news environment,
    456 I have to be honest with myself about what information is useful *to me* ([178]
    457 not in a capitalist sense 😉) and what I am likely to act on.
    458 
    459 Teaching myself to expect less information
    460 
    461 With [179]my self-imposed media diet — only allowing myself to look at my feed
    462 reader on the desktop, and saving everything to my read later app — I’m
    463 experiencing a lesser level of pace shock again, like I did when I quit
    464 Twitter. I’ve been accustomed to a constant influx of information, and I get
    465 antsy for novelty. Chris Bailey [180]points out that when you cut back
    466 dramatically on the stimulus you take in, “what feels like restlessness is
    467 really just your mind calming down.” I am retraining my brain about the pace of
    468 information it can expect to receive.
    469 
    470 Collecting less leaves me more mental space. So far, half the time I disrupt
    471 the impulse to feed my brain something new, I read things I’ve already saved on
    472 my read-later app, and the other half I start blogging. Both of these are a win
    473 in my book 😄
    474 
    475 I’m still in the transitional phase, not yet adapted, but I’ve carved out room
    476 for myself to slow down by changing my environment. My hunger for the new will
    477 probably never fully go away, but I think I can gradually pacify it into
    478 subsidence.
    479 
    480  
    481 
    482 Further reading:
    483 
    484 [181]What is rotting, if not rest? by Haley Nahman
    485 
    486  
    487 
    488 See also:
    489 
    490 [182]Reclaiming intentionality in browsing and blogging
    491 
    492 This is the (current) last article in a [183]series on the mindset of more.
    493 
    494    495   • Previous: [184]The open web as gift economy (Part 4)
    496 
    497   • Tags [185]agency, [186]balance, [187]bodies, [188]control, [189]FOMO, [190]
    498     indie web, [191]IndieWeb, [192]letting go, [193]media diet, [194]open web, 
    499     [195]overwhelm, [196]pacing, [197]place, [198]Ray Bradbury, [199]slow
    500     living, [200]social media, [201]spaces, [202]speed, [203]willpower
    501 
    502 [b1231bba531dc25e30]
    503 
    504 By Tracy Durnell
    505 
    506 Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at [email protected] or
    507 @[email protected]. She/her.
    508 
    509 [204] View Archive →
    510 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    511 [205] ← Read The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate [206] → Read Wooing the Witch Queen
    512 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    513 
    514 5 replies on “Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)”
    515 
    516 [b1231bba531dc] [207]Tracy Durnell says: @ [208]tracydurnell.com
    517 [209]December 30, 2024 at 4:47 pm
    518 
    519 I’ve been playing the game Satisfactory with my sister for about the past year.
    520 Neither of us have played games much, and that mostly pre-2000.…
    521 
    522 [210]Reply
    523 [912c1c1f9a18b] Erik says:
    524 [211]February 24, 2025 at 3:03 am
    525 
    526 Discovering, curating and organizing RSS feeds takes more effort than scrolling
    527 through simple algorithmic feed, but I like that it gives you a lot more
    528 control over the way you receive information!
    529 
    530 For me I’ve categorized my (text based) RSS feeds in three folders: 🥇, 🥈, 🥉.
    531 
    532 It’s loosely based on how frequently they post and how frequently I read vs
    533 skip them.
    534 
    535 The gold ones I almost always take time to read, and they tend to be the ones
    536 posting less frequently. Bronze is where I put all the blogs where I skip a lot
    537 of the posts. It’s also where I put most newly added blogs, and ones I’m
    538 considering removing. And silver is something in between.
    539 
    540 For me this distinction works pretty well. I have different approaches and
    541 expectations for each folder.
    542 
    543 [212]Reply
    544 [b1231bba531dc] [213]Tracy Durnell says:
    545 [214]February 24, 2025 at 8:29 am
    546 
    547 Ooh, the color tags are a great idea, thank you Erik! I have a “trying out”
    548 tag, but it hasn’t been that useful because sometimes people only post every
    549 few months so they are in there for a really long time, and then the folder has
    550 so many people in it I can’t keep track of who’s who.
    551 
    552 [215]Reply
    553 [912c1c1f9a18b] Erik says:
    554 [216]February 24, 2025 at 3:22 am
    555 
    556 Also, thanks for this series of posts! It’s been really insightful seeing not
    557 only your own stance on things, but also the many posts of other people that
    558 you’ve linked to.
    559 
    560 [217]Reply
    561 [b1231bba531dc] [218]Tracy Durnell says:
    562 [219]February 24, 2025 at 8:31 am
    563 
    564 Thanks! I’m glad it’s been interesting!
    565 
    566 [220]Reply
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