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 classification 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 passive exposure to mass 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 publishing information), try publishing 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.”
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 homogenize in groups, so people who are already obese may just associate 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 associate 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 Nazism. Humanity’s darkest moments are the ones in which masses 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 Washington, 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 classrooms 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.