The Information Diet

I imagined that sign-maker, Halliburton Woman, to be the polar opposite of Medicare Man. But equally wrong. I mean, even on the surface: nobody enlists for the United States Army at the Army hospital.

How could it be possible that educated, intelligent people have somehow become capable of believing in a distorted reality? At that moment, an idea popped into my head. What if a person’s native or learned abilities to process information sensibly could be warped by feeding junk into the mental machine? As we say in technology: garbage in, garbage out.

We know we’re products of the food we eat. Why wouldn’t we also be products of the information we consume?

In the case of the activists—one against Obama’s healthcare plan, the other against our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—these people certainly seemed informed. But it’s as though they had caught some kind of disease that made it so they couldn’t think clearly.

If unhealthy information consumption creates bad information habits the way unhealthy eating creates food addictions, then what good is transparency? I left the Sunlight Foundation. Transparency wasn’t the universal answer I was looking for. You cannot simply flood the market with broccoli and hope that people stop eating french fries. If large numbers of people only seek out information that confirms their beliefs, then flooding the market with data from and about the government will really not work as well as the theorists predict; the data ends up being twisted by the left- and right-wing noise machines, and turned into more fodder to keep America spinning.

Today, you’re likely to spend upwards of 11 hours per day consuming information—reading books like this, checking out your friends’ Facebook pages, reading the newspaper, watching television, listening to the radio or your portable music player. For many of us who work in front of a computer all day, it’s even more: we spend all day reading and writing in front of a screen.

The sheer amount of information available to us is mind-boggling. According to storage company EMC, there are presently 800,000 petabytes (each petabyte representing one million gigabytes) in the storage universe. And according to the University of California in San Diego, American homes consume nearly 3.6 zettabytes (one million petabytes are in one zettabyte) of information per day. It’s expected to grow, too: EMC expects a 44-fold increase in data storage by 2020.

So we’ve come up with this term to deal with it: information overload. (If you search for “information overload” on Amazon.com, you’ll get 9,093 results—roughly eight and a half times more than the number of results that a search for “irony” returns.)

For a new professional class, achieving “inbox zero” (dealing with every email inside of your inbox) is akin to running a 10k or getting a promotion at work. We’ve also developed a near bogey man type of mythology around our information abundance. In 2011, Nicholas Carr was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains (W.W. Norton).

Using Google’s n-gram viewer—a service Google provides that allows you to count how many times a phrase appears in its giant corpus of books over 150 years—you can see that the term information overload became popular just after 1960, and surged 50% by 1980 and and again by 2000.

The concept of information overload doesn’t work, however, because as much as we’d like to equate our brains with iPods or hard drives, human beings are biological creatures, not mechanical ones. Our brains are as finite in capacity as our waistlines. While people may eat themselves into a heart attack, they don’t actually die of overconsumption: we don’t see many people taking their last bite at a fried chicken restaurant, overstepping their maximum capacity, and exploding. Nobody has a maximum amount of storage for fat, and it’s unlikely that we have a maximum capacity for knowledge.

Yet we seem to want to solve the problem mechanically. Turn it the other way around and you see how absurd it is. Trying to deal with our relationship with information as though we are somehow digital machines is like trying to upgrade our computers by sitting them in fertilizer. We’re looking at the problem through the wrong lens.

Instead of the lens of efficiency and productivity, maybe we should start looking at this through the lens we use to view everything else we biologically consume: health.

What if we started managing our information consumption like we managed our food consumption? The world of food consumption and the world of information consumption aren’t that far apart: both the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience show us that information can have physiological effects on our bodies, as well as fairly severe and uncontrollable consequences on our decision-making capability.

When viewed through this lens, the information abundance problem appears more dire. Coping with the problem isn’t a matter of getting things done anymore; it’s a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.

There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us.

In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner.

The parallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet— knowing what to consume and what to avoid—has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity.

Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar—the stuff that people crave—media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?

Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences.

Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance— ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don’t affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated.

Driven by a desire for more profits, and for wider audiences, our media companies look to produce information as cheaply as possible. As a result, they provide affirmation and sensationalism over balanced information. And in return, we need to start formulating an information diet—what to consume and what to avoid— in this new world of information abundance.

The first step is realizing that there is a choice involved. As much as our televisions, radios, and movie theaters would have us believe otherwise, information consumption is as active an experience as eating, and in order for us to live healthy lives, we must move our information consumption habits from the passive background of channel surfing into the foreground of conscious selection.

The first part of this book is intended to give you a good idea of how we got to where we are—to explore the economics of information, and the biological consequences of our information consumption.

The second part of the book is an attempt to design an information diet—describing the healthy habits of a good information consumer, and providing pointers on how to consume that information.

The third part of this book is a call to action: if our information consumption has a social consequence, then it’s not only about ourselves, but also about ethics. Just as the food we eat has an ethical consequence, so do the choices we make around information. In order to create better access to information, better quality sources, and healthier lifestyles, suppliers must change. And suppliers will only change with proven demand. If things are to truly change, then we’ve got to break the insidious cycle that we ordinary people create with our demand, and media companies create with more supply.