Changing digital lanes
Like many other users in the last few months I've archived my Twitter account. It contained 13 years of memories and photos which I thoroughly enjoyed creating but the service was - and had been for a long time - not serving me as a user particularly well
Like many other users in the last few months I've archived my Twitter account. It contained 13 years of memories and photos which I thoroughly enjoyed creating but the service was - and had been for a long time - not serving me as a user particularly well. I decided that a change was needed.
The first step was to finally join a Mastodon instance. I tried this a few years ago and didn't give it enough time, returning to Twitter and Facebook with my tail between my legs. This time I persevered and, possibly because so many new users were joining at the same time, felt instantly welcomed and gently nudged in the appropriate directions to make connections, share thoughts and generally have an enjoyable time on social media for the first time in a long time. Another new user tooted that it felt like Twitter circa 2014. From my experience the bird site certainly felt a more welcoming and collaborative space from 2009-2015 than it did in the following seven years.
While browsing my Twitter archive on my computer I realised how much information and learning had been recorded in the 28 thousand tweets. I felt that I'd undermined some of the importance of what I'd recorded by not revisiting these learning points and reflecting on them. Initially that was the purpose of this blog, and I'd forgotten that.
So the second necessary change was to value the reading I do more by revisiting it regularly. Recently I'd maybe shared my thoughts or an article link on social media and then moved on. Books read were logged in Goodreads with a star rating, never to be glanced at again. I spotted an excellent service called ReadWise which uses retrieval practice techniques to share a small number of highlights from books or articles you have added to your account. I'm about 10 days in to using it and am really liking it. I initially thought that adding another notification would be a bad idea but if I sit down to review a few highlights over a cup of coffee between classes it makes me feel like I've accomplished something in those moments of recharging.
I spent a few hours today really investigating the import and export functions of ReadWise and this prompted me to sign up for a few other websites: raindrop.io is a bookmark manager with highlights (something I'd previously used Evernote to capture as I browsed, again also tumbling into the silo never to reappear) and NewsBlur, an open source RSS reader which might finally fill the void of Google Reader. The latter doesn't directly feed into ReadWise but allows me to pull news when I want to more efficiently than visiting all my usual sites. I then use the highlight feature of raindrop.io 's browser extension to save pertinent sections of any interesting or useful article. The fact that both are also available on Android added to the appeal.
The last piece of software I investigated today was October, a tool which links the highlights from Kobo e-Readers to ReadWise. It took seconds to set up and instantly transferred my database of highlights.
So what do I hope will change by using these new services? I want to be able to share information and ideas more thoughtfully again, but benefit from some automated prompting to link the ideas captured in my free moments. To do this requires changing into the digital equivalent of the slow lane, so I can occasionally look around and enjoy.