After my smartwatch has quietly buzzed me out of my slumber at the beginning of the day, I get up and do the walking-dead-shuffle myself downstairs in search of a cup of coffee. Without an afterthought I pick up my phone and wonder at technology as my yawning morning face is ‘good enough’ for face ID to let me have access to the digital realm. My browser flips open and I get todays news … Carefully curated by I journalist (I hope) but written for maximum engagement focusing on what all news-sites need to focus on: Fear, rage, greed … etc. Dodging mainstream I hit up Reddit where a mindless, soulless algorithm presents me with a never ending feed of posts to make me scroll, click, consume, repeat. Before the first cup of coffee has hit my cup, others have decided what I see, what I do and how it makes me feel. Funny huh.
So lately I have come prepared. I’ve decided I want to be one step ahead of just mindlessly opening up a feed and going through random posts. I get to decide FIRST. The way it works is that I have turned my Kindle Scribe (a device oversized for an e-reader and underpowered for an actual digital notebook) as some kind of curated newspaper I get to peruse over coffee and a slice of toast.
The first step here was pre-curating the stuff I want to read. When scrolling through newsfeeds there is so much to consume: Article X sounds interesting, I really want to know more about the website behind this link etc etc … But on a busy day there is not enough time, you get distracted, interrupted and the "stuff you wanna read" gets stored in your random "bookmarks" folder for …. someday.
Using Amazons Send-to-Kindle plugin (on the browser or via the IOS Sharing menu) I’ve started "saving" stuff I want to read later and putting together my own "offline reading list" that I can get to when I want to. Peruse the feeds, tag the articles for "later" and share them out to the Kindle. This way I get to choose what I read and fight the temptations of jumping ahead to the next dopamine hit before actually finishing what I want to read.
Now my zombified morning routine is a little more "Curated". Get up, huddle downstairs, stretch, yawn and pray to the coffee-machine to make me some black magic and … then I settle down with the Kindle on the couch. Like a modern day version of some Lord in Downton Abbey (without the butler), I sit and "peruse" the digital version of my "newspaper", Filled with a curated collage of my choosing.
Sure, there is a way to go. The articles (being "I need to focus to get through this" kinda stuff) are all kinda heavy for my 6AM brain, and there is no "Funnies" section to lighten the mood. But that is an idea for later.
Down the road I COULD do a combo of selected articles with content from other trusted sources via an RSS feed (the daily XKCD or Dilbert for example), but I don’t want to digress too far before wading back into a world where others have chosen my content for me.
But I have at least reached the first step of my journey. Finding a way that "the algos" (let’s call them that from now on) don’t get to "choose first" when it comes to the content I see in the morning.