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, analysis, 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 class 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 assure 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 passionate about—whether it’s building the world’s largest database, performing analysis 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 endorsement 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 classify 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. Nobody 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.