Critical Thought Is Endangered

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Brass Tack Thinking - Critical Thought is Endangered

I could have told you there were 42 reasons. Or 13. Or 6 steps. There aren’t. Or there may be, but I’m not going to list them out here. But headlines like that are just one contributing factor to a big problem: the continued erosion of critical thought and deliberate consumption and the hive-mind sharing [...]

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The Reaction Machine

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The Reaction Machine - Brass Tack Thinking

If I had named this post “3 Guaranteed Ways to Build Social Media Influence”, I can be almost assured that it would have ended up substantially shared even if the content was mediocre, and certainly far from anything guaranteed. If you write a post or an article and ask a provocative question in the title [...]

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Take Back Your Attention

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Brass Tack Thinking - Take Back Your Attention

The amount of attention we have to give is finite. The receipt of attention is earned, both initially to capture it, and continually to keep it. No one is entitled to it, ever. The online experience you immerse yourself in is, to a large degree, under your control. You can give your attention easily with [...]

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Calling for the Death of Consumption Guilt

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How often do you lament the fact that you can’t get through all of the stuff in your reader? I know I’ve done it. Do you feel guilty when you unsubscribe something or unfriend someone in your network? Why? Consumption of content is not a democracy. Giving of attention is not a democracy. We each [...]

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The Reaction Compulsion

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One side effect of the information firehose that is the web is that we consume content at lighting speed. We digest very little of it. Akin to wolfing down a bag of donuts because it’s your diet cheat day without tasting even one of them, we’ve gone into hyperdrive with the way we proudly amass [...]

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Finding Your Greener Grass

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Sometimes, you just outgrow things. When you first learned to read, Dr. Seuss was awesome. Simple, rhyme-y, easy to grasp and remember. When you were little, you likely read those books over and over and never got tired of them. Until you did. Until you needed something more to challenge you, to push your limits, [...]

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