Back in August, I wrote about the concept of “rewilding your attention” — why it’s good to step away from the algorithmic feeds of big social media.

I’d originally encountered the idea via a tweet by Tom Critchlow, referencing a post by CJ Eller, riffing off an essay by Ali Montag. You can go read my original essay, but basically the concept was that the algorithms in big-tech feeds have two problems…

• they focus heavily on the hot viral here-and-now: what highly popular folks are talking and arguing about, this very instant. And they focus on…
• material that’s customized for you — except it’s a dull, Demographics 101 cartoon of who you are and what you’re interested in

Either way, spending too much time in the big algorithmic feeds winds up being a form of intellectual monocropping. It’s not terribly diverse or surprising. It’s not that the stuff in your feeds is all bad; some of it’s great! But it’s got a deadening sameness to it.

So the concept of “rewilding your attention” means actively choosing to poke around elsewhere. As I wrote…

Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.

Okay, cool. But…

How exactly do you “rewild your attention”?

I talked about this with a bunch of folks online, then realized it might be interesting to share my own strategies.

Forthwith, my list of 9 Ways to Rewild Your Attention!

Quickly, though, two throat-clearing provisos:

First, this is just my own personal list of Things I Do. Give ’em a try if you’d like, but they may not work for you. They’re very text-heavy. I prefer to skim through lots of sources until something catches my attention — then I dive in. Since I find skimming/diving harder with audiovisual media, I stick mostly to the written word, on screen and on paper.

Secondly — and crucially — the signal-to-noise ratio on these strategies is low. They’re a ton of work! Looking for the offbeat stuff is like panning for gold: I’ll spend hours (even days) nosing around and finding nothing, until boom — something, out of nowhere, sets my brain a-tingle. So I tolerate a lot of failure and frustration.

This output of energy — the need to be patient, to tolerate lots of sifting, to engage in active effort — is precisely the opposite of the convenience/efficiency of highly sorted algorithmic feeds. There’s no shortcut to rewilding your brain, as far as I can tell.

And again, to be clear: Algorithmic recommender systems aren’t all bad! They sometimes find you some very cool things. They certainly keep you abreast of popular trends in online conversation. But when I ply any of the strategies below, in contrast, I inevitably stumble across incredibly fun, thought-provoking material that wouldn’t have stood a chance in the viral-gladiatorial combat of the major feeds.

To begin…

1) RSS feeds FTW!

The single most important way I rewild my attention is by using an RSS reader.

RSS, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a way to automatically follow blogs and online publications. You create an account with an RSS reader, subscribe to the feeds of your favorite blogs or online publications — then presto, when you open your RSS reader you see all the headlines from those places.

Why is this so good for rewilding? Mainly because the world of blogs and publications is filled with wonderful, niche, oddball stuff (including many straight-up, old-school personal web sites!). It’s really where the weird stuff lives. Better yet, most RSS readers will show you headlines in a purely chronological way: no algorithmic sorting.

My favorite RSS reader is Feedly. It’s got a great free tier, and a good discovery mechanism: You can type in a search phrase and it’ll show you a big list of possible sites to subscribe to. I currently follow 368 sources. (You can follow Twitter accounts and Reddit forums, among other things, too.) I’ll dip into it several times a day, and invariably find awesome offbeat material.

2) Fraidycat

Fraidycat is a fun app. It’s basically an RSS reader but with a temporal twist: It lets you sort your publications into buckets based on how frequently you want to check them. (“Real-time,” “frequent,” “occasional,” and “sometime.”) So I load up my Fraidycat app up with blogs or Reddit forums (or even Twitter accounts) where I want to peek at them, say, four or five times a year. Normally I’d never remember to do that. With Fraidycat, I do.

3) Browsing rapidly through paper books

Old-school nonfiction paper books are pure gold for rewilding your attention. They have the highest density of research-per-page of any form of media on the planet. Some author knocked themselves out for a couple of years distilling knowledge into that book you hold in your hands. It is quite nuts how valuable they are. They’re also super varied: Nonfiction writers go down super-niche ratholes. If you can even think of a subject, somebody’s written 90,000 nonfiction words about it.

My technique: I periodically head to the main branch of my public library and check out their “new nonfiction” table. I pick up literally any book there (bonus points if the book seems like something utterly unconnected to things I already pay attention to) and flip around at random. If I don’t find something that grabs me quickly, I put it down and grab another. Rinse and repeat!

It’s speed dating for ideas; harsh to the authors, I know, but after years of prospecting I trust my gut. If something clicks, I’ll take the book out and read it closely at home.

I’ll also periodically do the same thing with the back catalogue at a library: I’ll pick a subject area at random (Irish history? Italian cuisine? Figure skating? Suffragette poetry? Small-engine repair?) then poke around in the stacks to see what was published years ago.

(I do this in bookstores too, but obviously a library is much cheaper, and the back catalogues are much larger than in even a big bookstore.)

4) Reading super-old books online

Any book published in the U.S. before 1925 is in the public domain, so you can do amazingly fun book-browsing online. I’ll go to Archive.org or Google Books and pump in a search phrase, then see what comes up. (In Google Books, sort the results by date — pick a range that ends in 1924 — and by “full view,” and you’ll get public-domain books that are free to read entirely.)

I cannot recommend this more highly. The amount of fascinating stuff you can encounter in old books and magazines is delightful.

5) Rummaging through discussion boards

There’s a huge world of old-school discussion boards out there. Much as with nonfiction books, if you can name a subject, there will be hundreds of folks gathered together online somewhere talking about it. Typically these boards run on free software like phpBB, or they’re subreddits.

So sometimes I’ll idly pick a subject (any subject), Google to find a forum devoted to it, then poke around to see what people are talking about. Because these forums are off the beaten path and have small populations all devoted to their fave subject, they’re often quite civil places, and filled with expert knowledge. Last week I spent a couple of hours at a sailboat forum reading how people restored a specific brand of rare old boat; totally absorbing.

Tumblr works the same way, BTW. Though it was alternately neglected and badly torqued by Yahoo (including chasing adult creators away), it still hosts a bazillion weirdos documenting their obsessions.

6) Linksurfing off niche blogs

Whenever I find a blog or site in some niche community of interest, they often link out to fellow-traveller sites online. Folks who share the same passions are constantly shouting out to one another. Following these tracks, from one site to the next, can be an amazingly fun trail to follow. An obvious point, probably, but still true.

7) Weird search engines

A while ago I blogged about Marginalia, “a search engine designed to surprise you.” It actively downranks sites that have sleek, modern design — and which are optimized for search-engine discovery — and upranks text-heavy pages and personal websites. The upshot is that it produces search results utterly unlikely those of any modern “just the facts” search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo.

Marginalia is definitely worth trying, if you want to hunt down unexpected sites. In my post on Marginalia, I also linked to a few other search engines that similarly aim for oddness — all worth trying too.

8) Poetry: the weirdest literature around

This one isn’t a nonfiction recommendation, but: If you really want your brain to get out of its usual ruts, read poetry.

This has several benefits. One: Poets are generally the weirdest cats around. Poetry has a very high strangeness-to-page ratio, which can be great for reformatting your consciousness. Two: The way that poets use language and metaphor is quite unlike how writers of prose (fiction and nonfiction) use it. The language can be oblique and brain-jangling, and they grab a metaphor and smack you upside the head with it, no pussyfooting around. Good poetry makes you ring like a bell.

The downside is that the hit-to-miss ratio in poetry can be very low. Even excellent poets are often super inconsistent, dropping reams of mediocre lines before suddenly and unexpectedly knocking it flaming out of the cosmos. I can never tell when the dull stuff will end and the jaw-dropping line will arrive. I read a ton of poetry (alas, very few novels), so I say this not dismissively but as a personal observation of a genre I love. But reading a lot of poetry is, much like rewilding your attention, panning for gold. When you find the good stuff, it is intellectually and aesthetically unmooring.

9) Talking to people and asking them questions

This is another nondigital resource, lol, but hey: Always remember that everyday people are i) incredibly interesting, ii) super knowledgable about their passion subjects, and iii) invariably much loopier than they let on at first. (I say that as a compliment.) I’m a reporter, so one of my core bankable skills is talking to people — drawing them out, asking them about what they do for a living, what their interests are, what their life has been like… and with each answer, asking follow-up questions to solicit more detail. I have never met anyone from whom, if I ask a bunch of questions and listen attentively, I don’t learn a bunch of amazing stuff about a subject I’d hardly considered before.

(Fun tip, via Paul Ford: If anyone talks about their job or hobby, tell ’em “wow, that sounds hard.” This is a superb conversational gambit because a) it’s true; everyone’s job or hobby has hard stuff, and it’s in hearing about the hard stuff that you learn, and b) it usually makes the other person happy and opens them up, because they know this stuff is hard, and appreciate that you want to hear about it!)

Obviously this only works in situations where it’s appropriate to talk to people in depth, and where you’re not harassing them. But when it is appropriate, go for it. I recently read about a study finding that most people want to have deeper conversations with people they don’t know, but because we’re polite we stick to small talk.

So there’s my top nine ways to rewild your attention. It’s hardly an exhaustive list; I’m always up for learning more.

What are yours?

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.