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 sunshine 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 succumbing 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, shift your information consumption to local news and people who do care about you. Try to achieve deeper relationships 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.
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 advertisements as possible. The economics of advertisement-based media make it so that our content producers must draw eyeballs in on every piece of content, and that results in sensationalism.
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 advertisements, 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 advertisements. 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 advertisements—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 button 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 advertisements and suggested reading headlines on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device, or through Instapaper’s service on the Web.
Knowing that they’re circumventing the current advertising distribution model of information, Readability charges a minimum membership fee of $5.00 per month that you can increase to however much you want. It takes 30% of the membership 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 advertisements.
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.