Reflections 5th March

Focus, echo chambers, and slowing down

Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash

For a long time now, my work and interests have been in conversations just the other side of the “edge”, encouraging the emergent into view and considering what it means. Such conversations need fuel, what I think of as “logs on the fire of conversation”, and that fuel comes from two primary sources - other people who are “edge dwellers” and information. Books, articles, podcasts, Vimeo (which seems to host more interesting stuff than YouTube) and other media.

I’ve learned over the years to filter. The vast majority of media is in search of eyeballs for advertising. It is cleverly designed to do so, and in tandem with equally sophisticated algorithms, is very good at it. Filtering has become a skill. I filter at three levels; a core of trusted sources, a secondary layer of ones I visit monthly, and a third, with almost no filter, to allow randomness to do its work. Sourcing takes up around a third of my working hours. It’s a good job that I…