the information space

Social media platforms didn’t just change where we get our information; they changed who does the work of evaluating it. The assessment labor that used to be performed by trained professionals at institutional scale has been pushed onto each of us as individuals, without the training or tools those professionals relied on.

Information literacy (real information literacy, not the watered-down version you might have gotten in a one-hour high school library orientation) is about developing a different relationship with information entirely.

It means asking:

• Why do I need to know this? (Purpose)


• What will I do with this information once I have it? (Application)


• Who is

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Fragmented attention serves platforms better than focused attention because fragmented users scroll more, click more, engage more, and stay online longer. Platforms discovered that shorter bursts of content keep people engaged more effectively than longer, deeper content. They built systems that reward and train fragmented attention.

This created a... See more

the internet, as a social and cultural space is almost entirely performance. The whole apparatus has been hollowed into a content mill that grinds human attention into micro-conversions.

The discipline of information literacy has always pushed back against this. Its foundational premise is that access to information should serve the person seeking it, and that more is not inherently better. A librarian doesn’t hand someone every book in the collection and call it help. The work has always been about matching the right information... See more

Passive reception, letting a feed decide what we see next and for how long, is a fundamentally different cognitive experience than active retrieval, going to a source with a specific question and leaving when that question is answered. The former keeps us in a state of ambient alert. The latter gives us a sense of agency over what enters our... See more

Raw data, the kind the news delivers in volume, only becomes usable once it’s organized and given context. That context becomes knowledge only when we’ve had time to understand what it means, and understanding only becomes actionable once we’ve developed enough judgment to know what to do with it.

What’s happened since is not just a change in the volume of information, but a structural rupture in that relationship between knowing and doing. The internet didn’t simply give us more news. It collapsed every geographical and temporal boundary that had previously kept information at a manageable human scale.