My information environment (July 2017)

Open Thinkering Everything Else, aggregators, information, music, newsletters, podcasts, routines

A couple of years ago this month, I created a page on my wiki to keep track of my information environment. Not long before, I’d written Curate or Be Curated: Why Our Information Environment is Crucial to a Flourishing Democracy, Civil Society for DML Central, and I was concerned to ensure I was getting a rich and varied information diet.

Fast-forward to 2017 and the world is a very different place. So different, in fact, that I’m not so concerned that I’m choosing to read more ‘biased’ stuff. There’s a war of attention going on and, in any case, there’s no such thing as non-theory-laden consumption of information.

I’ve quit Facebook and Twitter, the former completely, and the latter I now only post links to. Consequently, I converse with my friends on Slack, and in a very nice left-wing bubble on the Mastodon-powered social.coop. I’m OK with being partisan at this stage of my life.

So below is my current information environment, give or take a couple of things I’ll inevitably have managed to omit. The wiki page can be found here.

Newspapers

  • The i (print subscription)
  • The Guardian (digital subscription)

Aggregators

  • Alltop
  • Arts & Literature Daily
  • Hacker News (although I tend to use hckr news)
  • Nuzzel
  • popurls
  • Product Hunt
  • Skimfeed
  • Spigot
  • Techmeme

Newsletters

I try out other ones, but these are my favourites:

  • Austin Kleon
  • Benedict Evans
  • Crossed Lines
  • Dialogic Learning Weekly
  • Documentally
  • EdTech Factotum
  • Education Design Lab
  • EFFector
  • Farnam Street Brain Food
  • Freshly Brewed Thoughts
  • Go Weekly
  • Hack Education Weekly News
  • Jocelyn K. Glei
  • The Journal
  • Nesta
  • Offscreen Dispatch
  • OLDaily
  • Orbital Operations
  • Product Hunt Daily Digest
  • Read Write Respond
  • Recomendo
  • Remotive
  • Ryan Holiday’s Reading Newsletter
  • The School of Life
  • Seth Godin
  • Sunday Dispatches
  • The Sprint
  • TL;DR
  • Traces
  • Visual Thinkery
  • We Seek

Podcasts

As with the newsletters, I subscribe to other podcasts on a regular basis, but here are my go-to ones that I wouldn’t want to miss:

  • 99% Invisible
  • The Adam Buxton Podcast
  • The Contrafabulists
  • Hardcore History
  • Freakonomics Radio
  • Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4
  • From Our Own Correspondent (BBC)
  • In Our Time (BBC)
  • Invisibilia
  • Philosophy Bites
  • Song Exploder
  • Team Human
  • Thinking Allowed (BBC)

Routines

  • Lifehacker / How I Work
  • My Morning Routine
  • The Setup

Internet culture

  • Emojipedia
  • Giphy
  • Kaomoji
  • Know Your Meme

Music

  • Brain FM
  • Hype Machine
  • SomaFM

Recommendations welcome! I’m always on the lookout for high-quality sources of information.

Image CC BY Alexander Svensson