The tools that are evolving in response to the most recent and biggest info crisis begin at the cognitive level. Trained human attention and judg-ment is required, or the technical leverage is useless. Before learning how to build radars, filters, and dashboards, it helps to begin by reviewing the basics of mindfulness. Formulate goals and turn them into intentions by paying attention every once in a while to what you are doing at the moment, and then reflecting briefly on how what you are doing relates to your larger goal. That’s all you need to get started; when you sit down in front of a screen, write out by hand your goals for each day on a piece of paper, and put it on your desk at the periphery of your vision. A few times each day you will notice the paper. At those moments, ask yourself how your current activity online fits your own goals for the day (and take a deep breath). Practice mindfulness in your use of media in small ways, find places to fit practice into your day, repeat until you’ve established a new habit of paying some attention to what you are doing with media—texting, gaming, reading, writing, Web surfing, or any one of the 1,001 ways to use your mind online.

hat awareness, which even tentative direct experimentation can grant to some noticeable degree, is the power tool that all the other literacies depend on. Mindful-ness is what connects your attention to skills of digital participation, col-laboration, crap detection, and network smarts. Deliberately exercised, continually strengthened, and judiciously applied, mindfulness is the most important practice for anyone who is trying to swim through the infos-tream instead of being swept away by it.

Minimally, the infosphere denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities, their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub-regions since the infosphere also includes offline and analogous spaces of information. Maximally, the infosphere is a concept that can also be used synonymously with reality, once we interpret the latter informationally. In this sense, the suggestion is that what is real is informational and what is informational is real24