I took Twitter off my iPhone’s home screen again. I found myself opening the app without thinking, scanning the timeline to the top, and then having no memory of what I just read. The activity was the opposite of mindful; I was reading Twitter entirely out of rote habit, getting a small hit of dopamine out of pure muscle memory.
I’d like to slow down my consumption of the Internet—I want as much of my interaction with it to be as deliberate as possible. Recently, I’ve found myself using more and enjoying good, old-fashioned RSS.
I put $18 into the effort, the annual cost of a Feed Wrangler membership. Feed Wrangler is an RSS aggregation service that emerged after Google Reader shut down. The primary service I get is a sync of whether or not I’ve read an article. The secondary service is a delightfully simple iOS app to read the feeds I choose.
RSS, like my iPad, has just enough friction to make me more mindful of my actions. To add a new feed, I have to click on a bookmarklet (I’m sure a iOS 8 action is on its way). To read my feed, I can scroll to the top, just like Twitter, but there’s not a constant stream. Rather than twitchily pulling down to refresh over and over and over again like in Twitter, using Feed Wrangler actually rewards me the less I check it. If, instead of opening it every time I turn on my phone to see what’s new, I wait 30 minutes, they’ll be enough content there to engage me, to sate me.
I’ve unfollowed people I don’t know on Twitter, instead just following their RSS feeds. I’m still interested in what these people have to say, but I’m enjoying reading their more fully-formed thoughts, rather than their stream of consciousness. Not that a stream of consciousness can’t be interesting, but I’m enjoying the feeling of not worrying that I’m going to “miss something” or that I have to be a Twitter completionist.
For mainstream world news, I’ve shifted to just reading The Economist once a week. I don’t need an up-to-the-minute reflection on world or national news. I don’t even need it once a day. I can be an informed citizen of the world just fine with a weekly summary. I wish a similar summary-style publication (or podcast) existed for local and semi-local news.
It can feel so good to be the first to know something, to get “the scoop” before your friends. It even feels good when people retweet my retweets. I was responsible for someone reading something that someone else wrote! I am amazing! But, I’m going to try and let that go, and trust that information I care about will make its way to me in due time, and try and be more present in my present.
