A Maker’s Ethos in the Era of Networked Attention

Once upon a time, we faced the scourge of Information Overload. Too many emails with too many details producing too many open loops to keep track of.

But now we have a new challenge: the Information Apocalypse. Not only is there far too much information to consume or manage, much of that information has now been weaponized. Whether it’s retargeted ads chasing us across the web, mobile apps designed for addiction, or emotionally charged news hitting us on every channel, it can often feel like we’re living in the informational end times. 

But I believe that makers have something to offer the broader society in these dark days: an ethos that subordinates information consumption to the act of producing things of objective value. Being a maker today is a radical act. It means treasuring the insightful, the subtle, and the private, in a world that increasingly prizes only the novel, the sensational, and the public. 

Being a maker requires patience when we’ve been trained to switch our focus constantly. It calls for reflection when we’ve been trained to react. It asks us to revisit an idea again and again until we’ve truly distilled its essence, instead of refreshing a feed for the newest of the new.

Mike Caulfield, in his brilliant talk The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (which I will borrow heavily from) argues that our predominant model for the social web – blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram, and others – is fundamentally broken. He makes the case that our survival as a species depends on us “getting past the sweet, salty fat of ‘the web as conversation’ and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.”

This is the way of the maker – to use time to create something timeless, to form something apart so that it can be integrated, to iterate toward perfection, to create in solitude something that will ultimately connect them with others.

It’s tempting to check out, to delete our Facebook account, cripple our devices, and move to a log cabin in the woods. But this is ultimately an abdication of our responsibility. Our responsibility to offer our gifts to the communities that have nourished us. To share what we’ve learned with others coming after us. To participate in our democracy as informed citizens. 

Being plugged in is a good thing, and there is value in every kind of information stream, from Twitter feeds to philosophy books. A balanced information diet draws from many sources: short and long form, simple and complex, trivial and lofty, familiar and novel. The Informational Apocalypse has little to do with the sheer volume of information we’re consuming. It comes from a diet dominated by the informational equivalent of fast food.