Lately I’ve been craving coherent threads in media. Front-to-back magazines, rather than sliced up articles. Full albums, rather than playlists. Aggregated digests, rather than the full fire hose.
I think this stems from a desire to step back. The raw feeds of content get continually more overwhelming, continually noisier, without any additional benefit. This is definitely true of social media (read: Twitter); it also crops up in the hot take cycle across blogs and news sites.
I don’t think it’s a revelation to advocate for more intentional, slower engagement with content, or to filter the vast majority of media through domain experts. But it’s worth emphasizing as an alternative mode of keeping up with the news.
This is especially true as more tools seem to crop up enabling healthier media engagement. Some companies have tried to cater to the idea of slower news, and/or news that has a clear end point. FT Edit is an interesting recent experiment in this area. I don’t think “slow news” is a particularly promising business model, given the vast array of incentives to the contrary, but the attempts to move in this direction are encouraging.
Certainly at the individual level, we’re well equipped to stave off the real-time information flow often thrust on us by platforms. Newsletters are excellent aggregators. Many of them are explicit attempts by domain experts to highlight the best of all kinds of domains--finance, internet culture, technology, etc.--for readers’ benefit. We’re freed from having to sift through everything ourselves, and we still get to feel reasonably well informed. Complementing this, magazines are still a thing! I don’t know if there’s a better way to get a sense of substantial, cohesive information than by reading through a magazine. And while subscriptions are expensive, many libraries offer free digital editions. Other media experience similar benefits—the popularity of massive video essays on YouTube is a prime example.
Of course, there are times when the full fire hose is valuable. Breaking news events, cultural moments, spending time going down a rabbit hole—all uniquely enabled by a massive well of real time content. And as a mode of consumption, curation has its downsides. Without access to established curators, smaller creators and less prominent voices have a hard time breaking through the noise. We’re limited to the perspectives and perceived importance of our curators. And those curators siphon off some of our attention, acting as a middle man between us and creators.
Even so, treating the fire hose as our default consumption mode makes it difficult to prioritize and maintain perspective. And in a broader sense, the desire to step back speaks to the idea of curation as the central act of our attention ecosystem. We have a basically infinite supply of stuff to consume; more than anyone could get through in a lifetime. We have a limited supply of attention, squeezed ever tighter. Curation is what helps us allocate our time optimally, honing in on the most important items and avoiding the trash.