The Information Diet
"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"
Stats for nerds
7recommend
14mentions
13people
2011–2025years
57% recommend29% neutral14% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Clay Johnson, author of "The Information Diet," wrote about this 10 years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120205012403/http://www.inform...
It really made me much more conscious about seeking out and reading original sources, rather than relying on interpretations and summaries from journalists, bloggers, etc.
- This strikes me as an emerging area for application trustworthiness and privacy issues.
In some ways it's an extension of This strikes me as an extension of the dark patterns work (https://www.darkpatterns.org/) or in a different way the work on addictive apps by Tristan Harris and his "Time Well Spent" (http://www.timewellspent.io/) efforts. Somewhat related from a self-help perspective is Clay Johnson's "Information Diet" (http://informationdiet.com/) model (See also and https://player.vimeo.com/video/63368251)
- Not me. Just FB. Removing just that is a big improvement. I'm still on IG. I don't look into Twitter much anymore, because it's not too different from FB.
Social media isn't news. Most of what we call news isn't. There's very little useful news out there. I read "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson which covered the topic quite well.
- Jesus man, that's some tenuous connectivity. The first article's really trying hard to link investment capital flows into some larger conspiracy. The second is about generalizing mapping tech originally developed for surveillance satellites to be used for publicly available imagery, and the purchaser's obligations to fulfill the contracts of the purchased company. Both are results of the same underlying issue: defense & intelligence run as essentially monopsonies for the technology they care about, so they have to pay to have it developed. Sometimes their result is generally useful (better search of documents), sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it just isn't for a while (until publicly available imagery is widespread enough to cover a large map).
If articles like these are the basis for your conclusions, really take a step back. I went down this route a little some years ago, and really just felt miserable for no good reason.
Now the next part of my suggestion is going to sound rough for a second, but please take it seriously. Check out a book called "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson. After reading (it's a really good book, and helped me a lot in avoiding this sort of stuff), watch a ridiculous conspiracy show on TV. My favorite recently was about whether mermaids were real.
Listen to the techniques they use in there -- By saying "A relates to B" and "B relates to C", they ask "Does A relate to C?" Even though A and B relate only through something remote, and similarly for B and C. But, imply a conspiracy and suddenly the remote links seem like a cabal of some sort. It's a manipulative practice to get eyeballs and clicks, and we have to identify it as toxic before we start taking it in.
- Here are some of my recommendations:
1. Hacking: The Next Generation (Animal Guide) - http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Next-Generation-Animal-Guide/d...
2. Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists - http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Computer-Science-...
3. Imagine: How Creativity Works - http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah-Lehrer/...
4. The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption -http://www.amazon.com/Information-Diet-Case-Conscious-Consum...
- I think it's great that you want to disrupt the media, but I don't think this idea is the way to do it. You're talking about taking a glass full of water out of an ocean.
If you're a developer wanting to make a difference I HIGHLY recommend checking out "The Information Diet: A Case For Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson.
I spent many years working in broadcast news and I can say that many of Clay's observations rang true with what I've observed over the years.
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