STOP getting distracted by algorithms, become addicted to your passions

Source: STOP getting distracted by algorithms, become addicted to your passions, Josephine, 19:32, uploaded 2025-09-11, Watch Later position 349.

Josephine opens with an excerpt from a 2003 interview with David Foster Wallace. Computer and internet culture move so quickly that they feed the part of us that wants speed and stimulation, whilst starving the part that can live in quiet. She thinks many people have consumed so much stimulation that they are unsure whether the quiet part still exists. For Josephine, that quieter mind is where curiosity begins, ideas take shape, and a person can find an identity that has not been assembled for them by a feed.

The video arrives through an algorithm, and Josephine keeps algorithms within the picture. She wants to notice the difference between information that a platform feeds us and information we choose to seek. Her proposal is a personal media ecosystem that uses algorithmic platforms alongside books, magazines, art, small presses, podcasts, films, and conversations. The point is to make research, community, and the search for an identity into active practices.

A media ecosystem assembled by hand

Josephine borrows a passage from Eliza Mclamb, who describes the internet as a “true miracle of knowledge sharing”. With some rigour, it can open decades of books, films, talks, and other resources. The difficulty is that this deliberate search competes with recommendation systems that remove much of the work of choosing. Convenience can make rigour hard to crave. Josephine keeps that tension in view: the internet remains useful, yet she wants to decide more often what enters her attention.

She calls a media ecosystem a collection of sources that can cross-reference one another and produce something else, such as an essay. Research itself matters before any finished work appears. It shows what catches a person’s interest, what questions keep returning, and how that person stands in relation to the world. The ecosystem can therefore be a source dump, although the more important activity is selecting and connecting the sources rather than collecting articles for their own sake.

Books are the first part of Josephine’s ecosystem. She tries to find them in second-hand bookshops, charity shops, and libraries, where the choice is less shaped by online popularity. The point is to encounter a book because its cover, title, or physical presence catches her attention, then to ask what she wants to read without a feed already proposing the answer.

Art offers a different route into the same question. A gallery can feel intimidating and sterile, yet art can also appear in a shop, as a print, or in another ordinary place. Josephine is interested in the work that keeps drawing someone back, even when they cannot explain the attraction after a few days. That pull can expose a thought already moving through the mind.

She mixes tangible magazines with online publications. Her examples include The New Yorker, The White Pube, The Paris Review, Real Life, and Momus. Newsletters can arrive by email through Substack or another publication’s mailing list, which gives them a different rhythm from an endless feed. She also used Google Scholar to search for books, articles, and essays by entering a subject and asking for scholarly work, although she says that the service was not working reliably when she last tried it.

The same choice applies to social platforms. Josephine tries to read the people she has subscribed to instead of accepting the feed’s “for you” selection as her whole media diet. She leaves the recommendation page available for new discoveries. Following particular people makes the source of the attention more visible and gives the viewer a say in whom they want to keep learning from.

Zines and small presses add a social dimension. Josephine has belonged to several artist scenes and describes the pleasure of making things with a group. She recalls zines placed in independent bookshops in editions of around twenty copies, alongside small presses such as If a Leaf Falls Press. These publications can turn up in bookshops and gallery gift sections, where they remain attached to a local scene rather than being sorted by a large platform’s popularity measure. Podcasts, films, and documentaries complete her list. She often searches for a documentary by looking up an artist she already cares about, and names Hilma af Klint: Beyond the Visible as one example.

The feed as a model of the self

A diverse ecosystem also changes how Josephine thinks about belief. People attach themselves to ideas that feel like them, then filter later information through those ideas until the ideas become part of their identity. Choosing where an idea came from matters when a person plans to let it represent them.

Josephine draws on Isabel Munson’s Mirror of Your Mind, which describes a close relation between an app that categorises its users and a user who categorises their own interests and identity. The profile begins to resemble the feed: it keeps producing, sorting, indexing, and refining an account of who someone is. Engagement metrics then provide feedback about which version of that account performs well. A person can end up presenting themselves as a neat package that is easy for other people and platforms to digest.

This is why conscious competence matters to Josephine. She asks how much of herself she wants to wrap in an algorithmic description and present to others. The question concerns more than privacy. A feed can make a person feel that its categories have discovered an identity that was already there, even though the platform has helped produce the categories and rewards the most legible version of them.

Coincidence, stories, and getting lost

Josephine then turns to Adam Aleksic, the writer behind The Etymology Nerd. Aleksic describes an algorithm as a model that uses statistical relationships to predict and control the world. A coincidence that looks like an anomaly to that model can become a story for a person. Human beings connect events that have no obvious statistical relation and use the connection to understand what happened and to speak with one another.

Josephine treats that ability to find a common thread as the beginning of original thinking. A connection between a small press, a video found on TikTok, and something that has happened in a person’s life may look accidental from the outside. Its value comes from the meaning the person makes from it. If every source arrives because a system has already predicted its fit, the encounter can lose some of its strangeness and with it the chance to make a new connection.

This leads to Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony. Josephine quotes the description of stories that move in circles, with other stories inside and between them, and of finding one’s way through them by becoming lost. She says the passage reaches Wilson through Terry Tafoya, although she cannot verify the original attribution herself. The uncertainty matters because the quotation carries much of the video’s account of research. Getting lost opens a person to listening. The path through a subject becomes a relation between sources rather than a straight route towards a predetermined answer.

An algorithmic platform can supply material for that process. Josephine’s objection begins when the platform supplies the connections as well. She uses digital gardening as a related practice, where a person keeps a changing network of ideas and lets links develop over time. A video that the feed places in front of someone can then sit beside a small press, a book, or an apparently unrelated memory. The question becomes what these things mean together for that person.

Wilson’s account gives the process a communal form. Research is a ceremony, and so is life, because ideas arise through relationships. Josephine describes the internet as a kind of shared brain or global village that can bring knowledge together across generations and places. She compares it to the woodwide web associated with The Hidden Life of Trees. Facts remain inert when they stand alone. Connections between facts and ideas can produce a new idea, and shared research can become a way of paying attention to the world.

The video therefore treats attention as a form of power. A feedback loop can keep returning a person to the same kinds of content, refining the loop until it feels like a self. A personally assembled ecosystem leaves room for a person to wander, notice an unexpected relation, and decide what that relation means. Josephine wants the internet’s shared knowledge without handing the whole act of interpretation to its recommendation systems.

The older warning about convenient images

Josephine closes by returning to Wallace, while stating the limit of the quotation. His interview predates social media, so he is describing an earlier form of screen entertainment. He predicts that technology will become easier, faster, and more pleasurable until people need to build some inner machinery to withstand it. Screens offer images from people who do not love the viewer but want their money. Wallace allows for those images in low doses and warns that they become fatal to a meaningful life when they form the main diet.

Josephine’s conclusion is modest. She hopes the video makes viewers notice when information is being fed to them and when they have chosen to look for it. The distinction does not require a pure life outside algorithms. It asks for enough awareness to choose sources, keep connections alive between them, and leave some room for a mind that can sit in quiet.

Limits

This is Josephine’s personal method for choosing and relating media. The video offers no studies or measurements for its claims about algorithms, quiet, or research, so it cannot establish a tested system for improving attention, creativity, or identity. Its quotations from Wallace, Eliza Mclamb, Isabel Munson, Adam Aleksic, and Shawn Wilson carry the argument, while the details and original contexts remain unevenly documented in the video. The Wallace passage comes from a 2003 interview before social media took its present form. Josephine also flags her uncertainty about the passage attributed through Wilson to Terry Tafoya. The sponsor segment has been omitted because it does not contribute to the argument.

Further reading / references

• David Foster Wallace unedited interview (2003).
• Eliza Mclamb, “The one about the phones”.
• Anna Howard, “creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling”.
• If a Leaf Falls Press.
• Isabel Munson, “Mirror of Your Mind”.
• Adam Aleksic, “algorithms are killing coincidences. what does that mean for language?”.
• Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008), including the passage attributed to Terry Tafoya in Josephine’s account.