The Conductor's Baton: On Shaping the Noise of the Feed
My RSS reader often feels like the chaotic prelude to a symphony. A hundred instruments, each an article, a newsletter, a blog post, are all tuning at once, a cacophony of brass, strings, and woodwinds vying for attention. For years, I thought the goal was to collect the finest individual instruments—to curate a list of the most celebrated soloists. But the result was still noise. The problem, I’ve come to realise, isn’t the instruments; it’s the lack of a conductor.
We spend so much time talking about the architecture of our digital gardens and the taxonomy of our notes, but we seldom discuss the art of conducting the raw intake. A great conductor, after all, does not play a single note. Their job is interpretation, emphasis, and timing. They decide when the cellos should swell into the foreground and when the flutes should offer a mere whisper of melody. They shape the noise into music.
This framing changes everything about how I approach my feeds. The ‘subscribe’ button is no longer just an act of acquisition; it’s an audition. When a new newsletter arrives, I ask not only ‘Is this good?’ but ‘What part does it play in the orchestra of my interests?’ Is this source a powerful timpani, providing foundational, percussive beats for my thinking? Or is it a delicate harp, offering rare, glistening insights on a niche subject? A feed full of nothing but percussion is just rhythmic pounding. A feed full of nothing but harps is ethereal and weightless. A balance is required.
The Unwritten Score of Curation
A conductor works from a score, a master plan for the piece. Our score is the intentional question we bring to our reading. Am I trying to understand the roots of a specific historical event? The score calls for a strong presence from the history section, with supporting harmonies from sociology and perhaps a light touch of biography. Am I exploring a new creative field? Now the woodwinds of beginner tutorials must blend with the strings of advanced theory and the brass of inspirational examples. Without this score—this guiding question—the instruments just play their own tunes, and the result is dissonance.
This also reframes the dreaded task of ‘pruning’ my subscriptions. It’s not an act of ruthless elimination, of declaring a source ‘bad.’ It’s the conductor’s decision that a particular instrument, however skilled, is not needed for the piece being performed this season. The virtuoso jazz clarinettist has no place in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. That doesn’t make the clarinettist worthless; it just means they are not part of this particular symphony. They can be archived, saved for a different season, a different score.
Finally, the conductor understands silence. The most powerful moments in music are often the rests, the pauses between the notes. In our relentless consumption, we forget the silent beat. The conductor’s baton, held aloft in the moment before the crescendo, is a tool as active as any that directs the playing. Applying this means building intentional silence into my reading ritual. It’s the space between closing the RSS reader and opening my note-taking app. It’s the pause after reading, before reacting or saving. It is in this silence that the individual notes from the feed begin to cohere into a theme, a thought of my own. The conductor doesn’t create the music; they create the conditions for the music to be heard. Perhaps our job as readers is not to consume information, but to conduct it into understanding.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: