The Information Diet Part 6

Symptoms and Severity.

These are all symptoms I've faced or observed in my own life as a result of information consumption, but it's certainly not an exhaustive list. There's also research on Internet addiction, screen addiction, and a variety of other addictive disorders that come alongside information overconsumption.

It's likely that if you picked up this book, then you're suffering from some of these problems, and may not realize that you're suffering from others. Though they're all frightening, they, along with a slough of social problems, aren't the real case for going on an information diet. The real case is the incredible benefits. Just like a healthy physical diet and exercise can help you live a longer, happier life, an information diet can contribute to the same, as well as more meaningful, tangible relations.h.i.+ps with the ones you love.

Part II. The Information Diet.

To me, Ed had superpowers. Ed sat in the office next to me when I was working at the search engine company Ask Jeeves about a decade ago, and I was always envious of his ability to stay healthy. In my mind, Ed did some form of triathlon that involved riding a bicycle underwater while carrying a backpack filled with sharks, and did most of his work as a product manager for Jeeves' business division while doing handstand push-ups. He is one of the healthier people I've met, and while his exercise regimen was part of it, it was his att.i.tude about food that gave him his edge.

My favorite thing about Ed was his total contempt for carbohydrates. At lunch, if he managed to get served a biscuit as a side item for something he ordered, he'd scowl at that biscuit until it went away (usually by way of me) like it was some form of dirty filth that had invaded his tray.

That biscuit wasn't there on his plate to tempt him. It was there to kill him: a little, fluffy, white, b.u.t.tery enemy waiting to pounce at any moment. But did he throw away his biscuit? No. Then he wouldn't be able to keep an eye on it, lest it try and escape. As though he was persistently testing his will, Ed would keep the biscuit on his desk to sit and grow stale as a frequent affirmation that he didn't need that pile of empty carbs.

In the world of information, there are thousands of biscuits all around us waiting to be eaten. It's up to us to choose whether to chow down or to stare at them with contempt.

Imagine a world where liberals stare at Keith Olbermann's show in the airport, not eagerly awaiting a confirmation of their beliefs, but in contempt for what these shows really are: biscuits in broccoli's clothing. Or conservatives asking to shut off the O'Reilly Factor at the bar because it may ensnare them in a closed epistemic loop. Or Apple fans going on a gadget blog fast for the weeks surrounding the latest iPhone announcements in order to make a more rational decision about how to spend their next $600. Those are the decisions that people who are trying to have healthy information diets make. We should be staring at these dopamine delivery services with as much contempt as Ed does his biscuits.

The result of going on a healthy information diet is better health and a better life. The next few chapters introduce the concepts and the framework for achieving that. They're designed to build the literacy and skills required to do it, and include recommendations for the habits it takes to consume and live well in a world of abundant information.

You'll have more time to do things you enjoy, and you'll spend less time doing the things you don't. You'll also likely live longer by reducing the things that cause you stress or cause you to make poor decisions. Because you'll be consuming critically and deliberately, you'll be able to even make better decisions when it comes to things like your food diet. Finally, you may be less at risk for a variety of mental health diseases like depression and a host of anxiety and mood disorders.

We need to get something straight before we jump in to what a healthy information diet looks like, though: fasting is not dieting.

It's good to disconnect-everybody needs a good vacation. But unplugging, "Internet sabbaticals," "social media vacations," and "email bankruptcies" are all ways to avoid the real problem: our own bad habits. Ask any nutritionist, and they'll tell you that a diet isn't about not eating-it's about changing your consumption habits.

Being thin isn't the point of a good diet, either; it's about a healthy lifestyle. Our obsession with weight rather than nutrition has us confused and lined up to be taken advantage of by shucksters in the bookstore promising us that we can lose weight and look just like the airbrushed people on the book's cover if we just follow their simple, easy, attainable plan.

Let's not fall into the same trap with an information diet. Just like a normal, healthy food diet, an information diet is not about consuming less; it's about consuming right. The next few chapters of the book describe a framework for building a healthy information consumption lifestyle for yourself.

There are many possible ways to do this, and the chapters that follow are but a recommendation that comes from my own personal experience, and the experiences of others whom I've interviewed.

We're now moving from the theoretical to the practical. I would love to say that much of this is backed up by neuroscience and psychology, and some of it is, but most of it isn't-it's instead based on what I've found works for me. Though if our brains can be rewired by poor information consumption habits, then one must presume that we can rewire our brains with good information consumption habits to do the opposite.

My recommendations are just recommendations. The key is to find an information diet that works for you. Pollan's "Eat. Not too much. Mostly plants" exhoration is a helpful framework but not a strict diet. You can take that, and use it to build your own food diet. Here's my rendition: Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.

The Infovegan Way.

In biology, the trophic pyramid is a simple construct we use to think about how energy flows through the food chain. In the food world, the people eating strictly at the bottom of the trophic pyramid are called vegans-and that's exactly what we want to emulate with our information consumption. Building on that philosophy, I coined a term in 2010-infoveganism-and started a blog called Infovegan.com to describe this lifestyle. Infovegans try to emulate the consumption habits and ethical habits of vegans in the world of information.

I'll admit: it's quite an intimidating term. A lot of people view veganism as an extreme diet, and for some, it triggers visceral reactions. Veganism is not without controversy. Even some food vegans take offense at the term, either angered at the co-opting of their name, or pointing out that the metaphor isn't perfect: lots of vegan foods are highly processed.

If you can get past the baggage that the term has, infoveganism is a valid description of what we're trying to do. Like a vegan diet, infoveganism connotes that there's more to the choice of going on an information diet than seeking a healthy lifestyle. It's also a moral decision.

At the heart of veganism is ethics. Vegans largely believe that animals, as living creatures, deserve basic moral consideration. Eating meat, they claim, has all kinds of moral implications: animal cruelty, high carbon consumption, and support of an industry without much concern for public health.

Agree with the vegans or not, you have to respect their stance. It captures perfectly what we're trying to do here with an information diet: respect the content providers that consistently provide us with good info-nutrients by sticking only to those providers, and avoiding everything else.

Like veganism, infoveganism requires conscious consumption, planning, and to a greater extent, sharpened and honed skills. To be a vegan means you've got to consistently put yourself in situations where you can maintain your diet. You cannot simply agree to go to McDonald's to grab lunch unless your diet is to consist entirely of french fries. You've got to know how to cook good-tasting vegan recipes, and know what kinds of food might be sneaking animal products in.

Being an infovegan means mastering data literacy-knowing where to get appropriate data, and knowing what to do with it, using the right kinds of tools. It means working to make sure you're not put into situations where you're forced to consume overly processed information.

It means that when you are consuming processed information, you consistently check the ingredients-if you're reading news on a new medicare proposal in Congress, it means you want to take a look at the bill itself, not just what the Huffington Post has to say about it.

Finally, it means a moral choice for information consumption: opting out of a system that's at least morally questionable, for a different way-a way that chooses to shun factory farmed information, politically charged affirmations-and choosing to support organizations interested in providing information consumers with source-level information and reporting that contains more truth than point-of-view.

Chapter 7. Data Literacy..

"To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic c.r.a.p detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you."

-Ernest Hemingway[76]

Our concept of literacy changes every time there's a major s.h.i.+ft in information technology. Being literate used to mean knowing how to sign your name. At one point it meant the ability to read and write Latin. Today, being literate generally means being able to read and understand a newspaper in your own language.

There has always been some group of people with a closer link to the truth than the rest of society. At one point in our history, some of our ancestors had the capacity for language, and some didn't. When writing was developed, we had scribes. When the printing press was developed, the author, printer, and publisher became the new gatekeepers. After we taught everyone to read a newspaper, the journalists became the cla.s.s closest to truth.

Now the problem is not a widespread inability to read and write, but the vast sea of textual, audio, and video data that we wade in every day. A new skill is necessary-one that helps filter and sort through this information.

Remember the trophic pyramid? It turns out that as energy makes its way up the food chain, its transfer gets less efficient. Consumers at each level of the pyramid convert only about 10% of the chemical energy from the step below them on the food chain. The further up the chain you go, the less energy you get.

This is why we don't usually eat a lot of other carnivores-we tend to eat either plants or things that eat mostly plants (like cows, chickens, and pigs), but we don't tend to eat things that eat cows, chickens, or pigs (like coyotes, lions, or hawks). Agriculture can't sustain the cost it would take to transfer that kind of energy up the food chain for all of us.

In the world of information, there's a kind of trophic pyramid, too; just swap energy for truth. The further away from the source-the more secondhand or thirdhand operators there are-the less truth there is.

We learn this when we're children. We've all played a game of "operator" or "telephone," wherein one person whispers a message such as "I like chocolate" into the ear of the child next to them, who then repeats the received phrase to the next child. The message is whispered on and on between all the partic.i.p.ants, filtered through satirists and bullies, until it comes out the other end: "Clay eats worms."

All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we're getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells. We have to move towards the base of the pyramid if we want to see what's really going on.

As we wade through ever-rising seas of abundant information, a new skill is necessary to stay near the bottom of the pyramid: the ability to process, sort, and filter vast quant.i.ties of information, or data literacy.

Don't worry, you're not going to have to learn how to be a computer programmer to have a healthy information diet-just like you don't have to be a journalist in order to read the newspaper. But the Internet is not only the best way to fill your mind with nonsense, it's also the best way to get source-level information. In order to have a healthy information diet, you must be capable of gathering information from the lowest rung in the pyramid.

Presuming you have access to a computer and the Internet, I've boiled down what I mean by data literacy into four major components-you need to know how to search, you need to know how to filter and process, you need to know how to produce, and you need to know how to synthesize.

You may think that you're already digitally data literate, and that you possess all of these skills. And you may be right, this chapter may be remedial for you. But I encourage even the most profoundly critical thinkers, the most brilliant statisticians, and the most talented writers to revisit what it really means to be data literate.

Search.

Knowing how to effectively and efficiently use Bing, Google, or any other major search engine is now a critical form of literacy. I suspect most people reading this book will have used Google once or twice in their lives, but it's worth noting that Google in particular has a tremendous amount of information available via search besides its web index.

Knowing, for instance, that Google offers not only web search, but also the ability to search through scientific papers, patents, and laws through scholar.google.com gets you closer to the facts. And though most scholarly papers, even ones funded by taxpayer dollars, sadly sit behind paywalls, it's possible to find the t.i.tle of the research paper you want to read, search for the t.i.tle, and find either the doc.u.ment itself or a decent take on it.

Knowing Google's advanced search techniques-to search through news, blogs, discussions, and social networks, and filtering by date, time, and source-gives us a good handle on how to get the best search results.

Finally, a lot resides inside of large data repositories that aren't findable through Google. Search literacy also means the ability to find the data you're looking for outside of a search engine, and to constantly be on the lookout for these repositories. USASpending.gov, for instance, is an attempt by the United States government to catalog every dollar it spends on contractors. It's an incredible resource for watchdogs and budget hawks, but you won't find its data through Google search. Search literacy means being keenly aware of these kinds of sources, and constantly looking out for them.

[76] http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/65aug/6508manning.htm.

Filter.

In 2004, concerned with people's willingness to believe everything they read, a 19-year-old George Was.h.i.+ngton University student named Kyle Stoneman created a website called gullible.info. The site was a daily diary of fake facts like: As of the end of 2010, there were at least nine countries in which public flatulence was illegal. Penalties for violating the statute ranged from the equivalent of a 50 cent (US) fine to public flogging of naked b.u.t.tocks to 90 days in jail.

Approximately one-half of 1% of the annual worldwide output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is due to soft drink carbonation. Despite the availability of a nearly no-cost switch to nitrogen, soda manufacturers are thus far refusing to make the change.

Prior to the discovery of antibiotics, horse urine was commonly used to treat pink eye.

Contrary to popular belief, cats don't actually sleep; their muscles relax and their breathing slows while the brain stays completely alert.

On any given weekday, nearly 16% of the crowd outside the Today Show has been convicted of at least one misdemeanor. Only 3.5% have been convicted of at least one felony.

Over the course of a few months, the site became immensely popular, and sometime in 2005, an overeager Wikipedia editor took one of gullible.info's pieces of trivia: "LSD guru Timothy Leary claimed to have discovered an extra primary color he referred to as 'gendale'" and added it to Mr. Leary's living historical record. Shortly thereafter, The Guardian-the newspaper with the second largest online readers.h.i.+p of any English language newspaper in the world-published: "He exhorted America to 'turn on, tune in and drop out' and claimed to have discovered a new primary colour-which he called gendale. Now Timothy Leary, the eccentric spokesman of the 1960s counter-culture, is to become the subject of a Hollywood movie."

A "fact" was born, and despite Stoneman's pet.i.tions, it remained online without correction for three months. Fortunately for us, Stoneman's purpose is social experimentation and humor-looking at his Wikipedia user page, it's clear that he spends a significant amount of time clearing out and correcting gullible.info entries on Wikipedia.org for the greater good.

Gullible.info is just a small example of what someone can do on a low budget to inject ignorance into culture. The fict.i.tious color gendale went from Stoneman's site through Wikipedia's editorial process, made it through The Guardian's fact-checking process, and stayed there for three months. The only person not presenting the discovery of gendale as fact in this scenario is the source.

Search alone won't help if we're unable to find the most reliable and accurate sources of information, or we're unable to draw accurate conclusions from the data we've found. We also must be able to think critically about the information we've received, and use the best tools we can to process the information effectively. The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It's our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

We must judge good sources through filters such as: what is the intent of the author? Is it to inform you, or is it to make a point? How does the information make you feel? Is your intent in consuming this information to confirm your beliefs or find the truth? Are you capable of viewing the information objectively?

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, partnered with the Aspen Inst.i.tute, provides a good overview of critical thinking skills. In the Knight Commission's report[77] (available for free online, and a good read if you're interested), they describe this skill as the ability to determine "message quality, veracity, credibility, and point of view, while considering potential effects or consequences of messages."

But the skills to apply these kinds of filters alone aren't enough. Data literacy must also include the ability to do something with that raw information-to process it in some way. In an era where spreadsheets help us to make the grandest of decisions, we must have basic statistical literacy and fluency in the tools that allow us to make sense out of numerical data, not just words and ideas.

Understanding how to use a spreadsheet like Microsoft's Excel, Apple's Numbers, or Google's Spreadsheets will help you sort through and see the facts better. There is also a variety of other tools that move beyond the spreadsheet that make it easy to sort through information; these include Google's Fusion Tables, Socrata, and Factual. They take time and patience to learn, but when coupled with the enormous amount of public data that's now available online, they give us incredible new opportunities to start seeing our world more clearly through the lens of data.

[77] http://www.knightcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Informing_Communities_Sustaining_Democracy_in_the_Digital_Age.pdf.

Creation.

Data literacy also means the ability to communicate and exchange information with others. Knowing how to publish information and the ability to take feedback are both critical skills necessary for data literacy. Tools like Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad, and the technologies that power them, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-these aren't just tools for keeping a personal diary; they're tools critical to digital literacy and expression.

Content creation and digital self-expression, through the creation of text, audio, or video content, are critical components of a healthy information diet. Content creation and publication are a critical part of literacy because they help us to understand better what we say, both through the internal reflection it takes to make our findings comprehensible to others, and through the public feedback we get from putting our content in front of others.

The creation of this book-the writing and editing of it-has given me more clarity on the message within it. Many paragraphs have been tested: I've taken paragraphs that I thought may be controversial, copied them into Google+ and Facebook, and pursued dialog with those people who were willing to engage with me. It's helped me strengthen some of my arguments, see things more clearly, and more importantly, recognize when I'm being nonsensical.

Synthesis.

The year 1999 was probably the most antic.i.p.ated in nerd history: the year George Lucas returned to debut the latest movie in his Star Wars franchise-Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was down in Albany, Georgia when it came out, my dad, my cousin Wallace, and I were all headed to see it.

After the movie was over, Wallace and I leapt into a discussion about the movie, praising the special effects and expressing our overall annoyance at Jar Jar Binks, now one of the least-liked movie characters in cinematic history.[78] We discussed the plot line and how we thought the other two announced movies would go.

My dad, a therapist for over 40 years by then, broke in. "I don't understand why it had to be so violent. It seemed to me like they had a forum, and all kinds of structures in place for conflict resolution. Why did people have to keep going on attacking one another when they probably could have just sat down and talked it out?"

Wallace and I rolled our eyes, and Wallace quipped: "It's called Star Wars, Uncle Ray. Not Star Dialog. That'd make for a boring movie."

Dad was right, though. In an ideal world, we'd all strive for the great synthesis of ideas, and it's a shame that more of us are concerned with winning an argument than we are getting the best out of one another. The problem is, Star Dialog just wouldn't make for a particularly entertaining movie (though I have to wonder if it would have been any less entertaining than The Phantom Menace).

The last component of data literacy is synthesis. Once we retrieve information, filter it, and publish it, we must be able to synthesize the ideas and concepts of others back into our ideas. Synthesis isn't entertaining, and we'd all rather argue or be entertained. View publication as a chance to get feedback and a chance to make your ideas and thoughts better-an opportunity for education as much as an opportunity to educate.

These critical thinking and data literacy concepts aren't skills you'll learn simply from reading the pages in a chapter of this book. It's a skill that takes years, lots of practice, and constant refinement to develop. But just like a regular workout, these skills are good for your health-they'll keep you living a richer, fuller life.

[78] I have no data to back myself up on this, and the data probably doesn't exist. But trust me, Jar Jar ruined childhood memories of Star Wars for millions of people.