Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. Anastasia Kozyreva, Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, argues that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is not merely about a skill of not paying attention, but about mindful and healthy information habits in the digital world.
emotional because it prepares us to avoid possible dangers