Search vs feed: pay attention to what you’re paying attention to — Imran Mahmud

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what I’m paying attention to.

Working from home has altered my daily routine. No more commuting, stopping off at the gym on the way to work or breaking my day up with a walk to a local coffee shop. Grocery shopping (which, as a foodie, was a bit of a ritual) is gone too. It’s now pretty much me and my computer during the working day. And with that, all the opportunities for distraction…

To get a grip on this, I figured if I can “catch” procrastination early, I can nip it in the bud. This got me thinking about what I do when I procrastinate. It’s typically some combination of social media and news (more news recently than normal).

(The thought that this piece is a form of “meta” procrastination hasn’t escaped me…)

Contrast that with productive states. This is when I’m searching for something… or learning something new. I was listening to a podcast where Austin Kleon spoke with Ali Abdaal about the difference between Search and Feed as concepts (link below).

So much of the information we consume in life comes via one of two modes: search or feed. Our online lives are built on products that innovated either on search or feed.

Let’s take a quick look at search vs feed

Search is usually deliberate, focussed effort. It’s active. We know what we’re trying to find, and we’re getting after it. There’s a skill to search. What are the right keywords? Should I put a filetype in my string? Is my query precise enough? The word itself comes from root meaning “to circle” — akin to how a predator might circle its prey. Search feels good as we close in on what we want.

Feeds are where we graze. It’s passive. The effort is minimal. We’re not choosing what we consume. In my case, sometimes I arrive by accident… pulling up a social feed in a moment of restlessness. Maybe I make an excuse to check the news, knowing something newsworthy is happening in the world. It always ends in that same feeling — regretting that I’ve lost another 15 minutes of my life 🤦🏽‍♂️

What’s the problem with feeds? And why bother making the effort to pay attention?

• Feeds aren’t nutritious: The word itself describes what pigs and cows are stuffed with (not for their benefit).
• Feeds are determined by someone someone for your attention: OK — I recognise they’re shaped by our friends, interests and some promoted content. But ultimately some algorithm somewhere is choosing what we see.. and optimising for our attention.

There’s a “macro” issue with search and feed.

⚠️Warning: here be speculation.. ⚠️

Now perhaps I’m extrapolating this too much. I’d love to hear if you think so. But there’s potentially a broader issue here, which is to do with how we spend our lives. How do we come to pay enough attention to care deeply about anything? How do we make the big decisions? Are we intentional enough? How quickly do we determine if we’re solving for ourselves?

The basic idea goes a little like this.

If you’re not deliberate about pointing your life at things that matter to you, you’ll be driven by your feed.

I’m not making a specific point just about social media feeds and how they determine what college you go to (although maybe we should talk about that). I’m talking about your life feed. This is some combination of your family, the people around you, teachers, opinions, ideas, expectations, community, the books you read (and your social media feeds). We’re exposed to these every day and they shape what we think, and what we think we want to do.

For many, this influence begins before we figure out what’s important to us.

For young people, the “assault of feed” starts early. I first encountered any type of social media when I was 19 and Facebook landed at Oxford University (I’m 33 now). By then, I already had a bunch of interests (also admittedly some insecurities). But I had a sense of what I wanted to pay attention to.

These days, feeds creep into children’s lives before their teens.

It’s not that your life feed or social media feed doesn’t contain helpful stuff and well-meaning people. The issue is this. If you don’t pay attention to what you’re paying attention to (and most kids don’t develop this mental skill until much later), you will be saturated by your feed (digital and otherwise). That might be fine. But it might also lead to a bunch of beliefs and decisions that shape you in ways you won’t want.

Austin Kleon also makes this point ( in this great podcast — 54m onwards):

“Make sure you’re not being fed your interests”

A lot of young people he speaks to say they don’t know what they’re interested in. They struggle to get fired up (I hear this from time to time from friends or other parents). Contrast this with Austin’s 5 and 8 year old kids who get super amped about certain things. His advice? Make sure you’re looking to cultivate your interests (or, as a parent — my interpretation — create space and opportunities for this to happen for your kids, including allowing them to get bored). Otherwise they’ll get saturated by their “feed”. Stuff that you don’t deeply care about but fills your head space.

The point in all of this is that it matters to pay attention to what you are paying attention to. For parents, there’s an added dimension of what your kids pay attention to, and how you support them to develop deep interests and passions.

Two minor points — not for this post:

• When search becomes feed: this is where lines begin to get a bit blurry.. when you think you have control over your search, but the platforms providing you search results are making choices about what to show you, and so they share characteristics with feeds. Let me give you an example. You open up Google, you search for “liberalism”. The answers that you are presented are optimised for you but in ways that are not transparent. You can’t really change that — it’s just important to understand. You take what you’re fed.
• Developing interests through feeds: Feeds can provide an important space for serendipity and finding things of interest that you might not have discovered otherwise. In my experience, this is usually shallow and you have to play close attention when skimming feeds to find places you can deep dive. E.g.; you might be skimming a feed, and see a quote from a book, and for a moment you’ll feel that you “get” the book and the main points. You’re unlikely to develop a deep enough interest in the material to hold a useful conversation for more than 5 minutes unless you take the time to actually read more of the book, related content from the author, or discussions of the material.. and your feed won’t (usually) give you that. You have to go deeper.

Originally published at https://www.imranmahmud.com on November 16, 2020.