ExerciseProposed · Critique of technology
Naming what the feed draws off
If no tool is neutral, the first act of lucidity is to name precisely what a device is built to take from you. The feed does not merely occupy you: it draws off your attention, and the has made a trade of it. This exercise teaches you to look at the app as a critic, not a user, to recognize its mechanisms, and, as urged, to give priority first to what it might cost you before rejoicing in what it offers.
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Enacts
- Relation to technology · Techno-criticism
Appears in
- Reclaiming attention — Faced with devices designed to capture it, can we really reclaim our attention by working at it, withdrawing, fasting from the feed, returning to the present, or do such techniques only paper over a trouble far larger than us?