The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
Clay A. Johnson
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1449304680
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear. Just as we have grown morbidly obese on sugar, fat, and flour—so, too, have we become gluttons for texts, instant messages, emails, RSS feeds, downloads, videos, status updates, and tweets.
We're all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness. The Information Diet shows you how to thrive in this information glut—what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential for everyone who strives to be smart, productive, and sane.
In The Information Diet, you will:
- Discover why eminent scholars are worried about our state of attention and general intelligence
- Examine how today’s media—Big Info—give us exactly what we want: content that confirms our beliefs
- Learn to take steps to develop data literacy, attention fitness, and a healthy sense of humor
- Become engaged in the economics of information by learning how to reward good information providers
- Just like a normal, healthy food diet, The Information Diet is not about consuming less—it’s about finding a healthy balance that works for you
Pulp Fascism: Right Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature
[18] http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/11/women-and-children-first-technology-and-moral-panic/ [19] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ [20] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/the-twitter-trap.html [21] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ [22] Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (p. 16). W.W. Norton & Company: 2010. Kindle Edition. [23].
Exhausted that I started having auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didn’t exist, or an imaginary door slamming in the background.”[36] Now granted, Miller was still working from the comfort of his house. You can’t compare the job to farming at the physical level—as we’ve noted before, farming tends to be one of the more dangerous professions in America. Mr. Miller isn’t going to lose his life in a tragic blogging accident. But it also doesn’t sound like.
Newly-elected President Barack Obama bring up healthcare. It should have been a great moment, the realization of my hopes for nearly a decade. Instead, I watched the nation go into a bitter and angry debate about the role of our government. Ironically, this was about the same time that my mom became eligible for Medicare. The news media was saturated with every kind of graph and chart about our healthcare costs, wait times, the efficiency of government, how Canada does it, how old people handle.
Visiting RescueTime.com or by visiting the resources section of InformationDiet.com. RescueTime sits in the background, whenever you’re using your desktop, and tracks what you pay attention to. It’s a silent, impartial judge that watches every website you visit, and every window you have open on your desktop, and measures how productive you are. During your first week using RescueTime, log in to the RescueTime website frequently to fine-tune the software. You can set up lists of websites that.
Any topic you’re interested in. The pattern here is simple: seek to get information directly from sources, and when the information requires you to act, interact directly with those sources. An over-reliance on third party sources for information and action reduces your ability to know the truth about what’s happening, and dilutes your ability to cause change. The thing that’s made what Alexis de Tocqueville called “The Great American Experiment,” as on page 135, work is our ability to be.