The Information Diet Part 9

Sensationalizing content tends to degrade its quality. That's not the only cost, though: because advertising persuades us, over time, to buy things that we wouldn't ordinarily buy, the cost of consuming ad-supported content is higher than we think. I know I've ordered a pizza or two from my local pizza joint after watching a television commercial for Pizza Hut.

The reality is that so much of our information-even information we pay for-comes along with advertis.e.m.e.nts, and it's nearly impossible to escape advertising completely. Our routes to work and our walks down the street are filled with advertising, and even if we manage to escape those, our trusty letter-carrier delivers more directly to our homes for us to see.

Part of a healthy information diet is respect for good content, and a disrespect for advertis.e.m.e.nts. We have to reward our honest, nutritious content providers with financial success if we're going to make significant changes. I subscribe to ConsumerReports.org and NationalGeographic.com as a paying member because they provide good, high-quality, and mostly ad-free content to their subscribers.

A healthy information dieter most certainly won't sign up to receive advertis.e.m.e.nts-though many of us do. Our email boxes are filling up not just with spam, but with the latest travel deals from Expedia and specials from JC Penny and Amazon.com. Unsubscribe from these lists, or create a filter or rule in your email client to remove them from your inbox.

While it's likely impossible to be informed and ad-free, it ought to be something to strive for. To limit your exposure to advertising alongside content, I recommend using tools like Readability.com. Readability gives you the ability to remove distraction from content-it removes advertising completely from any article you're reading, gives you a more readable typeface, and adjusts the width of each article to make it easier to read.

Readability incorporates another application called Instapaper in its service. It is a similar tool that also allows you click a b.u.t.ton on your web browser and move the article to your mobile device. With Instapaper, you can find articles you'd like to read, and read them more easily and more free from the distractions of advertis.e.m.e.nts and suggested reading headlines on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device, or through Instapaper's service on the Web.

Knowing that they're circ.u.mventing the current advertising distribution model of information, Readability charges a minimum members.h.i.+p fee of $5.00 per month that you can increase to however much you want. It takes 30% of the members.h.i.+p fee as its own, then allocates the remaining 70% to the content providers that you read through the service. It's an invisible, transparent way to support content providers without having to wade through advertis.e.m.e.nts.

The websites of all content providers are designed to keep you reading, and to expose you to the most advertising impressions possible. It's why they split articles up into several pages, and why when you scroll down to the end of an article, you're plied with more enticing articles to read.

Instapaper and Readability help to reduce your exposure to these time-sucks, and help you retain a sense of conscious consumption. The key part of these tools is that they make it easier for you to focus on what it is that you want to focus on, and eliminate the distractions you'd normally encounter. They make conscious consumption easy-instead of blindly surfing the Web and reacting to what's being thrown at you, you can instead shop for content, select the things you want to read, and then have a longer reading session free from distraction.

Diversity.

Processed information isn't the only thing to avoid. If we are comparing an information diet to a food diet, then affirmation of what you already believe is the mind's sugar. A healthy information diet means seeking out diversity, both in topic area and in perspective.

A healthy information diet means affirming our beliefs only to an extent, keeping a watchful eye on our own fanaticism, and soaking up as much challenge to our beliefs as we possibly can. Getting perspectives that agree with you is one thing, but getting only perspectives that agree with you is bad for you-it may limit your exposure to good information and may cause you to suffer from the forms of ignorance I described earlier. Moreover, it's through having your ideas challenged (and through the synthesis, a.n.a.lysis, and reflection of those challenges) that your ideas get better.

Fried chicken and ice cream are okay to eat every once in a while-at most, a few times a year when you're celebrating or feeling particularly down and just need some comfort food. The same goes for the news sources that provide you with the most comfort and information, or even antagonize you. Recognize them as primarily entertainment, and treat them like rare, special servings rather than as something representative of your daily intake.

Striving for synthesis is necessary, and that means actively encouraging a diversity of opinion at all levels of your information diet. Remember the story of Eli Pariser and the filter bubble: we never want a personalization algorithm to start thinking that we're only interested in hearing viewpoints from one particular side, one particular cla.s.s of people, or one particular topic or issue.

Asynchronous social networks (ones where you can follow someone without them following you back) like Twitter and Google+ allow you to craft a diverse set of information inputs. You can choose to balance your inputs by following people with a different background or point of view than yourself and your closest friends to get a better perspective, or to learn where people who are different than you are coming from.

Without constant attention to perspective diversity, we a.s.sure ourselves mutual intellectual sycophanticide. Because human beings tend to self-select into self-reinforcing groups, tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to get not only constant updates from our friends, but also constant affirmations of our beliefs. Only through constant pruning, selection, and conscious clicking can we make them work for us.

In other words, the only thing to be fundamentally opposed to is fundamentalism itself. To help counter this, I keep a bias journal on my computer, but you could just as easily have it written down on paper if you like. In it, I keep my firm positions and values-stuff I find to be absolute. It's just a simple, noncategorized list of strong biases I may have. Here are some of mine: Affordable access to quality healthcare is a fundamental right Innovation in the private sector will always outperform innovation in government Large organizations are less interested in the individual than small ones Strong affinity for Google products (could be because I get invited to speak at their conferences) Strong affinity towards technical solutions for social problems Men who wear brightly colored Pumas are annoying Some biases are stronger than others, of course, but what's important is that you're honest with yourself about what your biases are. Some of them could be deeply private, but you don't have to share your list. What's important is that you keep the list, are explicit about it, and constantly look to find data and people that challenge your biases-and prescribe yourself enough time to encounter them.

It's also important to seek out diverse topics of information, as the synthesis of information from different fields helps us create better ideas. It also helps keep us from losing our social breadth-so we have more to talk about than the specialized knowledge of our particular fields. Introduce some new ones into your information diet. I find three resources particularly useful in this regard.

The first is the Khan Academy. Started by Salman Khan in 2006 in order to tutor his young cousins, the site now features over 2,600 small lectures on anything from basic subjects like arithmetic and European history to advanced subjects like organic chemistry, the Paulson bailout, and the Geithner plan to solve the banking crisis.

Being an infovegan means acquiring the basic knowledge you need in order to understand what the data is telling you. The Khan Academy opens the door and lets you in. It's not a good stopping point, but it's an excellent way to pick up the basics of a subject that will give you the knowledge you need in order to conduct further research.

The second is TED (Technology, Education, and Design), an organization that puts on a conference every year. It invites luminaries from a myriad fields to come and present what they're working on, and then share the talks online via its website. TED talks-especially about things you're not ordinarily interested in-are a great way to add diversity to your diet.

The third is Kickstarter, which has effectively replaced the "Arts & Leisure" section of my local newspaper. Kickstarter's purpose is to fund small projects and help artists and entrepreneurs get off the ground, but it turns out that it's grown to be a good source of inspiration and entertainment as well.

Kickstarter lets you see what some people (the self-selecting group that uses the service) are pa.s.sionate about-whether it's building the world's largest database, performing a.n.a.lysis of hip-hop music, or writing a guidebook to breakfast joints in Columbus, Ohio. It lets you browse local projects, too, so you can see what kinds of things are starting up in your town-and if you feel inclined, you can support local artists.

Again, the point isn't to visit these three sites as an endors.e.m.e.nt of ideas, or a strict rule for your information diet. But in the frame of conscious consumption, they mean something different. You're choosing to consciously visit these sites on a regular basis in order to get something particular out of them: diversity.

Think of it like going out to a different kind of restaurant than the usual places you go. There's nothing wrong with eating at the same place every day, but sometimes you need to branch out and see what else is out there.

Balance.

So just how much of what should you consume? Every diet book in the world has some kind of recommendation-an interesting way of telling you what it is you should eat, and what it is you shouldn't. I'm afraid that in the world of information, our tastes are far more diverse and require far more specialization than our food diets, and thus, I can't make a recommendation for everybody.

There's also information I've left out-information that I'll make no attempt to cla.s.sify or prescribe a diet for. For instance, our varying religious beliefs have prescriptions for consumption that are inappropriate to contradict.

Our information diets are also tied to our professions. n.o.body but models and personal trainers get fired for eating too much fried chicken, or promoted for eating too much celery. But our information diets have serious job consequences: a doctor not dedicating enough of her time to skill development could lose her ability to practice.

Because our jobs and belief systems are very different, and because professions and religions often come with their own basic information diets baked in, a universal prescription for an information diet is impossible. But the good habits I've described in this chapter are possible.

The information diet I maintain looks like Figure 10-4.

Figure 10-4. The information diet maintained by the author.

The categories I've chosen here reflect the various suggestions I have in this chapter, but your breakdown will look different than mine. The situations of your work, and your stage in life, may require a vastly different diet than the one I'm on. And the truth is, the averages I've suggested are averages: they vary from day to day. Pollan's "Eat. Not too much. Mostly plants." beats the food pyramid not only with its simplicity but also its flexibility.

The cla.s.sification and categorization of information are always subjective, and sometimes controversial. Do not worry nearly as much about achieving some set standard of balance, or even emulating my diet. Worry about consuming consciously, and making information-and our information providers-work for you, rather than the other way around. Form healthy habits, and the right balance will follow from it.

Balance means keeping our desire for affirmation in check. For the amount of time I spend consuming things that I believe in, I try to spend twice as much time seeking information from sources that disagree with me. The end result is twofold: not only do I gain exposure to differing viewpoints, but I also limit my pa.s.sive exposure to ma.s.s affirmation.

Support and Fine Tuning.

Going on an information diet is as difficult as going on a food diet. For a lot of us, it requires the support and ideas of our family and community. And it's personal, too-our minds, just like our food palates, have different and unique tastes. Building a healthy information diet means discovering what works best for you, and creating a routine that you can stick to.

I built InformationDiet.com with this in mind. Reading this book is just the beginning of what is hopefully a larger journey towards better health, and as more people make more discoveries about what works for them, we can start sharing with one another what works and what doesn't.

If you're looking for ideas about what kinds of information could possibly share in your information production regime (I recommend at least an hour a day dedicated to writing or otherwise publis.h.i.+ng information), try publis.h.i.+ng what your information diet is, and how it's working for you. Publish it on the InformationDiet.com forums, or publish it on your own website and drop me a line on Twitter (@cjoh), and I'll be happy to link to it from InformationDiet.com.

Part III. Social Obesity.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

-Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Yancey 1816[86]

When we start looking at information consumption through the lens of a diet and take responsibility for the information we're consuming, things start to get really frightening. Poor information diets and poor filters are responsible for really atrocious things and have horrible social effects that are, as history suggests, as deadly as the worst of our diseases.

Physical obesity, it turns out, may be a social contagion. Some studies suggest, for instance, that introducing an obese person into your social circle may put you at risk for obesity. It's not hard science, and there is disagreement-the counterargument to these studies is that we tend to h.o.m.ogenize in groups, so people who are already obese may just a.s.sociate with one another, and reinforce one another's bad eating habits.[87]

Regardless of causality, this trend is something we recognize from common sense: hang out with people living healthy lifestyles, and chances are you'll be exposed to more stuff that's good for you and less stuff that's bad for you. If all your friends are alcoholics, it makes it more difficult for you to quit drinking. Because our consumption of food is tangentially social, those with whom we choose to a.s.sociate affect our intake.

Information is far more social than food. You can grow your own food, and eat by yourself your entire life, and still remain healthy-but if you were the only person on the planet who knew how to speak, read, and write, you'd likely go crazy.

Because information is social, information diets have far more severe social effects. Just ask Alfred Dreyfus.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Jewish man, and an unknown captain in the French army, who was rushed to Court Marshall and life imprisonment for allegedly leaking French secrets to the Germans. The evidence against him? A crumpled note in a trash can with a single initial on it. Though his handwriting didn't match the note, he was accused of disguising his own handwriting, and exiled to Devil's Island.

The French were swept up in a divisive debate over the man's guilt. The debate gave birth to a new word, intellectual, which was not intended to be a compliment. Instead, it was a derogatory word for the people supporting Dreyfus' release-equated with someone too introspective to be loyal to one's military and one's nation.

The head of the intellectuals was French writer Emile Zola, who famously wrote, "J'Accuse...!" in an open letter to the President of the Republic, describing the nonsense of the case that would eventually become known as the Dreyfus Affair.

It took 12 years of bitter public fighting for those intellectuals to win, and more for the French to recover. Dreyfus and the French are not the only victims of fights like this. The genocides in Rwanda were fed by hate speech on the radio. Hitler's embrace of the new media of film empowered n.a.z.ism. Humanity's darkest moments are the ones in which ma.s.ses of people had the worst information diets.

Today, we're fighting a million Dreyfus Affairs with one another. Rather than focusing on issues, we've tribalized into a million little rights and wrongs. In Was.h.i.+ngton, our completely polarized electorate is distracted from serious, solvable problems because those problems aren't salient or interesting enough for them to pay attention. What makes for good politics doesn't make for good democracy.

Why would someone pay attention to the major problems that we have with the federal acquisition regulation (which directs how government spends money on contractors) when we have to "win" on the debt ceiling vote? Why talk about measurable successes in our cla.s.srooms when we can have fights over the teachers' right to form a union?

You might argue that stupid people, willing to believe whatever they want to believe, will always exist. You might further argue that evildoers will always be there to attempt to take advantage of them. You're right. But the problem is getting more severe because the economics of how we get our information have changed so much that it's not just the stupid people who are getting duped anymore.

The only way we can solve the problem of information obesity is to change the economics of information. And while it's not going to solve itself overnight, it's an issue that, with enough demand from the consumer, will begin to change. Just look at what's happened with the healthy food and local food movements.

Welcome to the Vast Rational Conspiracy.

Part of the reason people have poor food diets is that the food that's cheap tends to be the food that's the worst for us. Thus, there's a strong relations.h.i.+p between poverty and obesity in the United States; it turns out that our poorest counties are also our most obese. But there is a way to change that.

As a result of consumers demanding healthier food, and a public concern about obesity, Walmart is attempting to cut up to 25% of the salt, fat, and sugar from its foods in order to combat obesity. Because of demand, Walmart is now the single largest provider of local, organic foods to the market. The result: the entire food industry is changing and following suit so its foods can be sold in Walmart stores.

It's not just taxes and smoking bans on cigarettes that drive down the number of smokers in the United States. There's also social consequence to smoking. Now, smoking isn't just something that causes cancer: for many, it's something that's socially unacceptable-a cultural faux pas. The smokers have been dismissed to our back alleys, behind the buildings. More and more, they're forced to hide their habit, which in turn creates fewer smokers.

We can do the same with our information providers, but only if we show consumer demand for high quality, source- and fact-driven information. The market will move, but only if we show that there's a positive economic outcome from doing so. If we start to change our information consumption habits, the whole market will change to follow suit. If Fox and MSNBC are no longer rewarded for being affirmation distributers, and their ratings start to change as a result, it will have consequences not just for the information dieters, but also for the public en ma.s.s.

An information diet isn't just something that's good for you. An appropriate diet is a social cause that yields a better ecology of mind-one that's more immune to contempt and hate, and to the tragic consequences of what those emotions beget.

If we begin to demand an end to factory-farmed content, and instead demonstrate a willingness to pay for more content like investigative journalism and a strong, independent public press, we'll not only force the market to follow our lead, we'll build a better, stronger, and healthier democracy. The high-end consumer can drag the market along with it.

If we make a healthy information diet as normal and obvious as something like a healthy food diet, then those that aren't consuming healthily will begin to feel social pressure. n.o.body wants to be ignorant or even have the appearance of ignorance. The social consequences of being seen as ignorant are far more significant than the social consequences of smoking or obesity.

With another divisive election around the corner, I'd like the consequence of you reading this book to not only be your going on an information diet, but also to your starting or joining a local campaign for information dieting with three goals in mind: To increase the digital literacy of our communities with the skills I outlined in Chapter 7: the ability to search, process, filter, and share.

To encourage the consumption of local information that's low on our metaphorical trophic pyramid.

To economically reward good information providers, and to provide economic consequence for those who provide affirmation over information.

This kind of campaign mustn't revolve around a particular person or personality, but instead be driven from the ground up. As much as I'd like to use the political skills I've learned in the past 10 years to drive a traditional campaign, doing so would go against the principles of the book. Instead, a campaign like this has to be driven at both the geographically and socially local levels: neighborhood by neighborhood and network by network.

[86] The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition 14:384 [87] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.165.3862&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

Conspiracy in Six Easy Steps.

Share this book. If we're going to do this right, then we need more people to know what a healthy information diet looks like. After you're done with this book, share it with a friend-or, if you're feeling generous (to both the friend and your humble author), buy them their own copy. The principles of digital literacy, humor, attention fitness, and a healthy information diet need to spread if we're going to succeed.

Organize. There may be an infodiet group in your area. Check out http://informationdiet.com/local to see if one exists near you. If not, start a Google Discussion group at http://groups.google.com. Name it something that's easily discoverable by people in your community: "InformationDiet Austin" or "InformationDiet East Bay." If you send me a link to your group via Twitter (I'm @cjoh), I'll make sure to link to it on http://informationdiet.com/local for other people to find.

Focus and be civil. In your group, keep the focus on the mission: digital literacy, local information, and changing the economics of your information providers. Your group should practice healthy information diets during your discussions; it's useful to be somewhat strict moderators. Your discussion group should never degenerate into political discussions-that's something that there are plenty of other venues for, and as a group, it's better to steer those discussions to the places where they'd be more appropriate.

Meet. Like, face to face. Anonymity is useful when speaking truth to power and sparking revolutions, but isn't particularly useful when trying to create civilized discourse. Use Meetup.com to find or host regular InfoDiet meetups in your area. Share them with me, too, on InformationDiet.com and via Twitter. I'll make sure people know they're happening, and I'll try to attend as many as I can.

Learn. There's more to this subject than the concepts in this book. If you're looking for things to discuss in your local group, check out some of the great reports that the Knight Commission puts out on the future of information and the media, or read some of the many doc.u.ments in the further reading and bibliography sections of this book. You can also tune in to the blog on InformationDiet.com as more is discovered in the worlds of neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

Act. The group isn't meaningful unless it causes outcomes useful to its local community. To improve digital literacy in your community, start with kids. Find and fund nonprofits that help to teach these skills to children in local schools or in after-school programs. To get information from the bottom of the trophic pyramid of information, start advocating for your local government organizations (your county and city) to create online data catalogs and make public the data that you're already paying for. The same goes for the media: start demanding that they offer source material rather than provide you with their a.n.a.lysis and perspective.

It's also important to share what you've learned and how you're causing change in your community, to help others that are starting groups in their local communities learn best practices. InformationDiet.com has lots of resources to help you, including a discussion board that you can use to connect with other groups across the globe.

The remainder of this book is a call to action for the vast rational conspiracy-ideas and observations that come from my time here in Was.h.i.+ngton, and my time working with and interviewing civic leaders across the country. It's the empowered information diet: once you lose the fluff and start really seeing what's going on, new priorities arise that require new tactics to accomplish.

Chapter 11. The Partic.i.p.ation Gap..

"The great lie politicians like me tell people like you is 'vote for me and I'll solve all your problems.' The truth is, you have the power."