Part 6 (1/2)
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.