Curate your Content

“You are the average of the five people you spend most time with.”

This was one of the bitesize lessons that stuck with me while I was reading A Pocket Full of Do by Chris Do, founder of The Futur. The book goes on to talk about how we are impacted by the relationships we form with the people we surround ourselves with, and thus affect our way of living. If we surround ourselves with cynicism and defeat, we learn to accept and embody those values. But if we spend more time around driven, resilient, empathetic, and optimistic people, we also nurture that ethos within ourselves.

This extends beyond our relationship with people and is also true of the content we consume.

More and more, we take in information everyday — from the moment we open our eyes and check our phones for news, to the time we close them listening to music as we fall to sleep. In 2021, consumers around the world spend an average of seven and a half hours of media everyday.

Amidst all of this, we — as the designers, developers, product managers, researchers, writers, etc. — are right in the middle of it all balancing the act as both creators of content and consumers of it.

In a world that’s constantly vying for our attention and information, it’s time for us to take a step back and reflect on our relationship with the media we consume and how we could do better for our future.

How did we get here?

“[I believe] the biggest shifts in society are around the development of new systems of communication.” — Hank Green (Interview from The Financial Confessions podcast, Episode 44)

In order to trace back our roots in content creation and consumption, it is important to point out the simple and old adage: the medium is the message. This may all date all the way back from cave paintings in Lascaux to the Gutenberg printing press, daguerreotype to Polaroid cameras, or phonographs to radio, and television to the Internet that we know and love today. The medium shapes how our society works and how content gets made. Through time, we forget and create clear boundaries separating one from the other, when they have always been intertwined from the very beginning. This tendency is not wholly our fault. L. Gitelman (2006) remarks “the success of all media depends at some level on inattention or ‘blindness’ to the media technologies themselves in favor of attention to the phenomena, “the content”, that they represent for users’ edification or enjoyment”. With how exponentially faster the world runs nowadays, it’s easy to overlook that the internet is not even half a century old,and social media platforms (and subsequently, their content) are still considered to be in their early form.

Control over the medium also leads to control over the content, whether the intentions are good or bad. We hear it everywhere: corporate DMCA takedowns that cripple content creators, fans standing up for social good through online platforms, Wikipedia articles nominated for or are being deleted, and of course, the Facebook papers.

Many historians, educators, and scholars have been warning about this for a very long time. I can assure you they have called out designs and designers on it in one way or another. As such, it’s our responsibility to practice due diligence, meaning opening our eyes and ears, and listening to those experts now.

One thing that I learn from all of them is this: Humans seek stories to make sense of the world. We seek these stories through the content that serves us best. In turn, we shape our content with the stories we share and tell.

Audit our accounts

So let’s figure this out. Open your notes app, or grab a piece of paper and at the top of your head, list down the things you use to consume your daily dose of content. Do you have a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer? Do you watch TV? Movies? Books? Comics? Magazines? Do you have certain apps you go to get your daily news or connect with? Do you receive newsletter emails regularly?

By now you’re probably getting overwhelmed. That’s okay, let’s sort them out. Which content is educational or entertainment for you? Which material makes you actively use your brain to solve problems, learn new things about the world, and help in upskilling you in your career or lifestyle? Which ones did you watch, read, or listen to just to turn your brain off and simply enjoy the thing? How many of these are a regular part of your life and how many do you think are just one-off instances that just happened to catch your attention in the moment?

Note that you will probably not be able to list down everything, but try to think of those that stuck with you as much as possible. Podcasts, music albums and mood playlists, editorial articles, web shows, graphic series, animated films, sports news, etc. Another note is that educational and entertainment may intersect in some ways, and that’s okay!

Try to connect patterns in your content consumption and see if you can spot interesting correlations and causations. Get as creative as you can get!

Through this simple exercise, you can get started on reflecting more about your current behaviors and practice a little more self-awareness around your day-to-day habits.

Mapping out mindfully

So, what do you do afterwards?

• Educate yourself

Fortunately for us, many experts have studied some fairly long-term effects of our media in an ever-rapidly changing world. As such, we have learned to take some steps in creating systems to combat disinformation and hold accountability from our media sources. Organizations and platforms such as Common Sense Media, WikiMedia Foundation, News Literacy Project, and even Crash Course’s Media Literacy introductory course, are some really good places to start learning about how information is reviewed, evaluated, preserved, and/or disseminated. If you want to go a little more in-depth, here are some search terms to google: media literacy, content consumption, information overload, digital citizenship, net neutrality. (Have fun going down those rabbit holes!)

• Tracking your media diet

There are two ways to do this: the fun way, or the practical way (or a combination of both is also possible). Either way, the goal is to slowly make it an exercise for yourself to list down, map out or visualize your consumption in one way or another. This makes you more mindful and self-aware whenever you are going into a material or niche interest.

These can come in many different ways. In 2021, I made an Instagram highlight that collected all the podcasts and audiobooks that I listened to –complete or otherwise–throughout the year. It was quick and easy, and I could see the story of my headspace that made me gravitate towards some kinds of content more than others. Chris Do presented an illustrated face chart showcasing his personal brand story, maybe you can do that to portray the content you most consume as well! You could also record through journaling in a notebook, sketching it out on paper, typing it down on a notes app, or some other creative way that you can document, archive, and look back through the material you’ve touched over some period of time. The important thing is to make it fun, make it easy to do, and do it consistently.

• Don’t like? Don’t interact.

There is power in saying no and setting boundaries to the things that do not improve your relationship with certain media. Audit the Slack or Discord communities you may have once been involved in but do not provide value anymore. Consider exiting/leaving groups within social media platforms or communities altogether if you do not find any value in them. Utilize the “mute”, “block” and “report” buttons on your favorite social media accounts to avoid engaging in hot-button topics and posts-gone-viral that you would not have otherwise in any other scenarios. Apply extensions that best modify your online experience to your needs. Check your email subscriptions that you want to keep receiving regularly and ones that you should probably let go. Learning to declutter your digital spaces will tremendously help you focus on the things that matter most to you and sparks joy as Marie Kondo would say.

One good example these exercises helped me with was coming to the realization that I wasn’t engaging with news and pop culture topics through diverse channels. Oftentimes, the ways I was figuring out what current affairs were worth paying attention to was through Twitter’s trending topics, Instagram’s explore page, and whatever YouTube serves me on their landing page, which are 1) very narrow in scope, 2) algorithmically generated, and 3) flimsy and unreliable at best as solid sources of information. So, I started mindfully bookmarking specific news websites to check such as Reuters and NowSimplified. I follow a select few news channels online that I can count on to keep an honest and open conversation about what’s happening in the world while also being mindful of their experience and qualifications as communicators. I started using a Chrome extension that hides explore and trending tabs on Twitter so that I can avoid using (or being tempted to use) those specific features for pointless purposes. Since then, these actions have been helpful for me, prioritizing what current info about the world is important to me, keeping me away from being easily pulled into divisive topics that ultimately don’t involve me, and making more mindful decisions in my day-to-day life.

Disengage to Disempower

In the end, it’s also important to remind ourselves that we — human beings — have the power to choose what influences us and what doesn’t. We control our content. We curate our content. The choice is in your hands. A tweet, a post, news, or any type of media can only hold so much power as long as you pay mind, and let it.

As the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal once tweeted, “for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that’s pretty much all the info u need.”

Inspiration & References:

Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture by Lisa Gitelman (2006)

The Digital Social Contract by Jeremy Kaltz, Robert John Davis, Alta Sparling, and Bing Chen (2016)

Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility by Steven Heller (2018)