The Information Diet Part 8

Chances are, if we can't laugh at something, we can't think rationally about it. (The exception to this rule is sports. Sports is about clear wins and losses, and most importantly, entertainment. It's okay to polarize sports-it's not any fun if you don't. The last thing we want to do is think rationally about sports. The stuff that matters, though, is about our livelihoods and the future of our country.) Laughter is important to a healthy information diet because it has all kinds of incredible health benefits. It turns out laughter increases our heart rate in a good way, increases our cardiovascular health, and burns calories. Some science shows that laughter may cause increased blood flow to the brain and decrease stress (thus boosting our immune systems), may normalize blood sugar levels, and may help us sleep better.

The first way a sense of humor helps is that it makes the truth more palatable. It bypa.s.ses our gut reaction for fight and flight, and makes it comfortable to hear what's going on in a more digestible fas.h.i.+on. Shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report help us to find humor in the daily news, but they also tend to feed us small nuggets of truth wrapped in delicious, bacon-like hilariousness. Sometimes, it's a healthy way of getting some national news exposure without having to take stuff too seriously.

But watching the Daily Show isn't going to give you a sense of humor, and relying on it solely for your national news information diet is likely to leave you with a point of view that's just as misinformed as watching FOX or MSNBC. Jon Stewart himself will tell you: his job is to entertain you, not to inform you or even tell you the truth. The difference between Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly is that Stewart is honest about his role as entertainer.

While these shows are funny, watching them isn't the same as having a sense of humor. We shouldn't conflate laughter with having a sense of humor. Laughing is important, sure, but being able to see the humor in all things-especially yourself-is even more important.

It turns out that a sense of humor might just be a vital part of our brain's ability to rewire itself.

Much of what makes us laugh are things that are unexpected. The great jokes are about misdirection and surprise. As we antic.i.p.ate the punchline of a joke, we're trying to figure out where it's going-the joke itself tends to be a buildup towards an expectation, and then comes the punchline: usually something unexpected. That's what makes it funny.

Take Rove's letter: he leads with something rather standard-a greeting and formality, but then closes with a killer punchline. It immediately changed my opinion of Rove, unwiring the heuristic in my brain that's been trained by years of being a democratic political operative to believe that the man is pure, unbridled evil.

Instantly, upon reading that letter, Rove became to me somebody that's human and very aware of himself. My presumptions about him changed and all of a sudden, I found myself saying in my social circles, "Oh, Karl Rove isn't so bad. He just has different beliefs than we do." I'd get jumped on, then pull out the letter and show it off. The power of Karl Rove's humor softened the hearts of even the most liberal of activists.

It turns out that there may be some science behind this idea. In their book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press), scientists Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. provide a cognitive and evolutionary perspective for our sense of humor.

They argue that humor could be a cognitive cleanup mechanism of the mind, that nature needed a way for us to constantly check our judgmental heuristics, and reward ourselves for seeking the unexpected. They stipulate that laughter itself is a social signal that demonstrates cognitive prowess-something that's useful in mate selection-and thus, our ability to laugh spread through generations.

Humor tends to be a useful mechanism for figuring out when you're overly attached to information, too. If you can't laugh at something, it likely means you're not flexible with the information-that you take it so seriously that your mind cannot be changed. While it's good to have these stances on some topics (say, the Holocaust or slavery), if you can't laugh at Lebron James jokes, you might be taking your love of the Miami Heat a little too seriously.

Studying humor tends to make whatever might be funny no longer so, so I'll leave it at this: lighten up.

Chapter 10. How to Consume.

"While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority."

-Michael Pollen So now we've got our three skills: data literacy, a sense of humor, and a method for training and accounting for our executive function and attention span. The question now is: what is it that we should consume? What kinds of information go into a healthy information diet?

The world of food is littered with advice, and the one we probably know the best comes from the United States Department of Agriculture: the food pyramid. You've seen it-it looks like Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. The United States Food Pyramid: 19922011.

In 2011, the food pyramid was found to be too complicated, so it was distilled into something a bit more simple, ChooseMyPlate.gov, shown in Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2. The New ChooseMyPlate.gov: 2011.

There is currently no government agency to monitor information consumption-though former President Bill Clinton suggested creating one in May 2011.[83] He suggested an agency that would regulate our information providers and suggest to us what information we should consume and which we should not-an independent agency run by the government that would determine what kinds of information ought to be released.

I suspect that if this idea gained any serious traction in government, the public would loudly destroy the thought. It's just not viable: the first amendment prohibits any authority a federal agency could have over speech, and even if that were miraculously overlooked, it'd be a waste of money. The agency would have zero credibility with any consumer of information.

It'd be immediately labeled an Orwellian "Ministry of Truth." We can regulate food because neither beef nor turnip greens typically inform our vote. Moreover, it'd be impossible to label and cla.s.sify all the kinds of information we consume. A nutritional label (see Figure 10-3) would be equally impossible and ridiculous.

But just because there shouldn't be a ministry of information, it doesn't mean there shouldn't be "dietary guidelines" for information. They just shouldn't come from government. Ideally, they ought to come from science, however you won't find many neuroscientists clamoring to build the info-pyramid.

And of course, with food, we have the aforementioned 60,000 diet books available on Amazon.com if we want to get more advanced. Unfortunately, we don't have the same kinds of resources to draw upon for creating a healthy information diet book, since it's difficult to dissect individual information resources for their exact nutritional values. On top of that, proposing a list of information one should take in seems nearly reprehensible-who am I to tell you exactly what you should be reading?

Figure 10-3. A sample information nutrition label.

I don't want to tell you what information to consume, or impose my own biases on you-that wouldn't be responsible. Instead, I want to give you a framework for information consumption. Like nutrition, you won't be nearly as successful at this if we focus too much on the food itself; instead, we have to focus on developing healthy habits for information consumption.

But, as I've noted before, the Internet moves faster than an author or a publisher, so if you want the latest and greatest resources, please visit InformationDiet.com and visit the wiki where I, along with the community of other readers, will keep an updated list of reliable sources at the bottom of the trophic pyramid.

Consume Consciously.

Let's first define the kind of information consumption that matters for our discussion. When I say consumption, I mean the kind of consumption that requires action on your part to initiate, with something whose purpose it is purely to provide you with information. Watching television, surfing the Web, listening to the radio, playing video games, and reading books, magazines, or newspapers-these are all forms of active information consumption. If it has a channel, a page, a frequency-if it involves you turning it on and off, or you picking it up-that's the kind of information we're talking about.

We're not talking about the information consumption you don't have explicit control over beginning and ending: advertis.e.m.e.nts on the side of the road during your commute to work, conversations with friends, families, and the waiter at your local restaurant, or the music in an elevator. While these things do contribute to your overall information intake, you don't have a lot of control over them, so we can't do much about them without turning you into a recluse.

We're also not talking about the production of information for others to consume. While this is part of data literacy as we discussed earlier, writing, outlining, and even editing shouldn't count towards our total information consumption.

Keeping It Clean.

You'd never be successful on a food diet if your freezer was filled with ice cream, your refrigerator was filled with fried chicken, and your cabinets were filled with macaroni and cheese. So first let's clean out our metaphorical information refrigerator.

I advocate canceling your cable or satellite television subscription if you have one, and getting your video entertainment from services like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. With the exception of weather information, most news services carried by television networks don't do the public any service. Having cable (or satellite TV) in your home while being on an information diet is like trying to go on a food diet with a magical sink that pours not only hot and cold water, but also delicious milkshakes. While you may have the will to resist it, let's do what we can to increase our chances of success.

This move is also economical. A basic cable package, on the lowest end, costs consumers an average of $52 a month or $624 per year. Add in premium stations and advanced packages, and you'll see your cable television bill approach upwards of $100 a month or $1200 a year.

With a reasonable broadband connection, even if you purchase individual episodes of television at $2 an episode from a service like iTunes, you end up with a net annual savings, and many other benefits, including not having to watch advertis.e.m.e.nts, resulting in saved time. You'll also remove the temptation to couch surf and mindlessly watch any show being provided to you.

But besides saving you money, cutting cable is going to start changing your relations.h.i.+p with information-and s.h.i.+ft you from being a reactive consumer to a conscious one. If every piece of information you consume on your couch comes with a cost, or at least involves more conscious selection than flipping through the long list of what's available on cable at a given time, you'll have more control over what you're consuming.

Tim Ferriss, in his book The 4-Hour Work Week (Crown Archetype ), advocates for an information diet that he calls selective ignorance. It first involves fasting: not checking email, not dealing with social networks, and avoiding much of the "incoming" information you have for a solid period of time. During this time, one allows only a deliberate intake of one hour of non-news information on television, and one hour of fiction reading per day. Then you wean yourself back onto an information diet of only information that's actionable and relevant.

For most, I think this will yield an unsuccessful outcome. By the end of the fast, you'll be so eager to plug back in that-like a food fast-you're likely to binge as soon as you get the chance. The selective ignorance plan also encourages us to eliminate diversity in our information diets, rather than exposing us to a diversity of knowledge, information, and opinion that may come our way.

I prefer a data-driven and more pragmatic approach. When you start a food diet, the most sensible way to figure things out is to first audit the calories you're taking in, to see if you're overconsuming. An honest food journal can help you keep your food intake under control.

We should try the same approach with information. We need a framework for figuring out how much information we're consuming if we're to consume more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. There are three ways we can measure our information intake: by the number of words we hear and read every day, by the amount of overall bytes we consume (like we measure computer intake), and by hours-the amount of time we spend deliberately consuming information. There will always be more bytes and more words, but time is non-renewable, so let's use this as our method of measurement.

Take a liberal count of the hours you spend in front of a computer consuming information for one week. You can do this in two ways: by keeping a journal and spending two minutes at the top of each hour estimating how much of your time you spent consuming-or automatically, by using a time-auditing tool like RescueTime, and then estimating the amount of noncomputer time you spend afterwards.

Since we're using time as our measurement, it makes sense to use scheduling as our form of information intake. If we stick to a schedule, we're exercising control over it, rather than allowing it to control us. It will also help us to respect our information-intake time. By allowing ourselves only a finite amount of time in which to consume information, we can consume more deliberately.

I recommend trying to slowly adjust to an information consumption time of no more than six hours per day. For some of us-the knowledge worker especially-this sounds impossible. But look at it this way: the professional's job is to produce, and if you're spending less than half of your work day on the production of information, you're likely not being as productive as you could be.

A sample information intake schedule may look something like this: 7 a.m.8 a.m.: Information consumption time. Read the newspaper, watch morning television, check the weather, check social media feeds, etc.

11:30 a.m.12:30 p.m.: Email.

4:30 p.m.5:30 p.m.: Email.

8 p.m.10 p.m.: Entertainment time. Watch television, check social media feeds, etc.

10 p.m.11 p.m.: Fiction reading.

For the person with Gmail or Outlook living permanently on her desktop, Twitter scrolling by in the background, and Skype and Google Talk running in the background, even the idea of this schedule may cause heart palpitations. It's a strict, low information schedule involving only two hours of email, four hours for entertainment, and zero hours for education or research.

This schedule is a framework of what your information diet could look like, but it's not written in stone. Some days, when you need to do a lot of research or you feel the urge to learn something new, you might move things around and consume less entertainment or less email than you would on another day. Some days, your information diet will just require you to consume more information than others.

The important part isn't what you spend your time on or when you spend it. The important part is that you create a flexible schedule for yourself and stick to it.

For the average person, who currently consumes more than 11 hours of information a day, I do not recommend jumping straight into the six-hour information diet. Instead, try to wean yourself slowly. Give yourself achievable goals. Audit the time you're presently spending consuming, and start reducing it by 30 minutes every week until you get to a time that's right for you, your goals, and your job.

For many, this will result in a net increase in our most non-renewable resource: time. A six-hour consumption day is truly terrifying for some, not because they're afraid of no longer being connected, but because they won't know what to do with the extra time. If you're cutting five hours off your information intake time, you're going to need to divert your attention to something else during those remaining hours.

Try to fill some of those reclaimed hours producing, rather than consuming, information. Try writing in a paper journal, writing articles for a blog, taking up photography, or creating funny videos of kittens for the YouTube audience, if you must. As we discussed in Chapter 7, Data Literacy, the production of information sharpens the mind and clarifies your thought.

You can also increase your social time, spending time talking with your spouse, family, and friends. Another good use of your time is giving your mind a chance to digest the things that you've read by taking long walks, spending time exercising, or even meditating.

Nutrition isn't just about what or how much to eat, it's about eating balanced meals. Just like the new recommendation graphic from the government recommends that our plate consist of 30% grains, 30% vegetables, 20% protein, and 20% fruit washed down with a gla.s.s of milk, we've got to come up with a healthy means of consciously consuming information.

Unfortunately, we can't make an exact replica of MyPlate.gov for information-we don't have the kinds of neurological research out there to figure out what a healthy, complete diet truly looks like. But like Banting, we do know the kinds of things we ought to consume less of.

Ma.s.s affirmation is the refined sugar of the mind-I'm not talking about the kind of relatively rare positive affirmation you get from friends or family, telling you that you're loved and respected. Rather, it's the ma.s.s affirmation: the affirmations you get that aren't intended for you specifically, the stuff that television is best at, but also permeates through all of our information delivery mechanisms. The suppliers that make a living telling you how right you are are the ones you ought to avoid the most.

I try to limit myself to no more than 30 minutes a day of ma.s.s affirmation, and strive to consume much less. It means making some tough choices, and letting go of some things you might enjoy. At a maximum of a half-hour a day, for some liberals, it means having to make the dreaded decision of choosing between Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a regimen of DailyKos. For the conservative, it may mean having to pick between Fox and Friends for a half-hour in the morning, and a half-hour of Bill O'Reilly in the evening.

[83] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54951.html.

Consume Locally.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Del Rey) by Douglas Adams starts off with the book's protagonist, Arthur Dent, having his flat completely demolished by a local government agency, thanks to an eminent domain ruling to build a highway through his apartment building. The notice, it's written, was to be found in the bowels of a government building, up for "public display."

Perhaps Dent was too obsessed with US Weekly, or news from far away. Our obsession with national news over local news has to end. While it's important to stay abreast of national and world affairs, most of us give too much weight to information that's not actionable and relevant to our daily lives. There are more dealers of junk, more profits involved, and more lies to be told as we sit higher on the trophic pyramid.

A healthy information diet means the avoidance of overprocessed information. A healthy information dieter constantly tries to remove these junk dealers from the consumption chain. That means either consuming locally or working consistently to remove distance to the things that you investigate.

Consuming low on the metaphorical trophic information pyramid doesn't mean just sticking closer to the facts; it also means that it's easier to stick close to the facts when you stick close to home. The further away from home you get, the more attention you have to pay to how many operators have been involved in getting you that information.

Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, once quipped, to the alarm of many an activist: "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,"[84] and while I too bemoan the trivialization of famine, genocide, and HIV-he has a point. You alone can go get the squirrel and clean it up and prevent your neighborhood from smelling like dead animal. Chances are, you're unable to solve famine, rid the continent of Africa from evil warlords, and cure HIV all by yourself. Local news is more actionable and relevant to the individual than global issues.

Luckily, there's a renaissance going on in the world of local news-new tools allow you to get online and see news and information down to the narrowest geographic criteria possible: your block. Today, major cities and government agencies are releasing information by the gigabyte that informs us on the real goings-on in our neighborhoods.

If you're in one of the dozens of cities lucky enough to be covered by Everyblock, I highly recommend it as an important daily source of information. The site aggregates dozens of data feeds that come from local governments and turns them into an easy-to-read, relatively opinion-free way of seeing what's going on at the block level-and you'd be surprised how much information there is about your single block.

Everything from bulk trash pickups to police reports to photos taken in your neighborhood to recent real estate listings are available for you. You register for the service, plug in your address, and tell the service whether you are interested in getting information about your city, your neighborhood, or the area within an eight-block, four-block or even one-block radius of where you live.

The site also allows you to post messages to other people in your neighborhood so you can talk about the issues affecting your real, local community. It makes the information that comes out of your community immediately actionable, and allows people to connect with their neighbors easily.

Beyond Everyblock, your city may have its own data catalog available for you to peruse. Most major cities-like D.C., Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York-have them, and more are on the way. To find yours, do a Google search for your city's name and the phrase "data catalog" and you'll likely stumble upon it. If you cannot find one, try searching for the email address of your local government's CIO (Chief Information Officer), writing to them, and asking them to make the data feeds that they have available online.

Public data is your data-you fund its collection with your tax dollars, and it ought to be taken out of the silos in the underbellies of city halls across the country, and into the light of day. Most suns.h.i.+ne laws-laws that require governments to respond to citizen requests to be open-require government officials to respond to citizen requests for information. Be an activist, and ask for its release.

It's hard to be factually incorrect about this kind of data, and reading about parking in your neighborhood may seem quite dull. Over time though, you're able to spot trends: observing a string of car thefts on your block may yield you some pertinent information-certainly more pertinent to your safety than whether the federal government is going to invest in high-speed rail.

For news, reading your local paper, watching your local news when it's on, or reading local blogs isn't a bad idea, but keep in mind: you're now becoming a secondary or tertiary consumer of information, and you're more subject to succ.u.mbing to your own bias and other forms of misreporting.

While this information is less likely to be as manufactured as what you'll find in the national and international news, it will still require some work in order to make sure it's trustworthy and verifiable. In order to consume this information safely, you must do the extra work of investigating source material, figuring out the intent of the person delivering that information to you, and determining that information's effects on you.

The local news renaissance is also a renaissance in specialized, deep wells of information. Instead of grazing on global and national news, and information about people you don't know and who don't care about you, s.h.i.+ft your information consumption to local news and people who do care about you. Try to achieve deeper relations.h.i.+ps with the information you're consuming: if you must consume information about the affairs of people and places far away, try slicing off a niche, and developing a mastery of it.

But geographically local information isn't the only kind of local information we can get to. Socially proximate information also sits near the bottom of our informational trophic pyramid. Like geographically local information, socially local information-information about the people closest to us-is actionable, relevant, and important to our connections with other human beings.[85]

The Web gives us new ways to check in on those we know and love, even when they're far away. But like all other forms of information, social media comes with consequences. We have to filter the information that our friends are sharing about themselves and the information that they're resharing from elsewhere.

It's good to fine-tune your lists of friends and acquaintances and fortunately, all of the major social networks give us this ability. Facebook's groups and lists, Google+'s circles, and Twitter's list functionalities make it so that we can sort our friends and view our social networks through the lenses of what's important.

If you are a user of one or more of these services, take an hour or two and sort through your lists of friends. Create a group, list, or circle for family members, another for close friends, another for work colleagues, and another for people you'd like to get to know better, and read those posts consciously during set periods of the day, rather than plunging yourself into an ever-growing stream of incoming media that your brain will be unable to resist.

[84] http://books.google.com/books?id=PxTvbM-VCPEC&lpg=PA296&ots=DSf8nQQX5i&dq=a%20squirrel%20dying%20in%20front%20of%20your%20house%20may%20be%20more%20relevant%20to%20your%20interests%20right%20now%20than%20people%20dying%20in%20Africa%20Zuckerberg&pg=PA296#v=onepage&q=a%20squirrel%20dying%20in%20front%20of%20your%20house%20may%20be%20more%20relevant%20to%20your%20interests%20right%20now%20than%20people%20dying%20in%20Africa%20Zuckerberg&f=false [85] If you still have one, call your mother.

Low-Ad.

We've adjusted our information culture such that we now expect information to be free to the consumer. But that free information comes with a much higher cost: advertising. A healthy information diet contains as few advertis.e.m.e.nts as possible. The economics of advertis.e.m.e.nt-based media make it so that our content producers must draw eyeb.a.l.l.s in on every piece of content, and that results in sensationalism.