The Information Diet

Part II. The Information Diet

To me, Ed had superpowers. Ed sat in the office next to me when I was working at the search engine company Ask Jeeves about a decade ago, and I was always envious of his ability to stay healthy. In my mind, Ed did some form of triathlon that involved riding a bicycle underwater while carrying a backpack filled with sharks, and did most of his work as a product manager for Jeeves’ business division while doing handstand push-ups. He is one of the healthier people I’ve met, and while his exercise regimen was part of it, it was his attitude about food that gave him his edge.

My favorite thing about Ed was his total contempt for carbohydrates. At lunch, if he managed to get served a biscuit as a side item for something he ordered, he’d scowl at that biscuit until it went away (usually by way of me) like it was some form of dirty filth that had invaded his tray.

That biscuit wasn’t there on his plate to tempt him. It was there to kill him: a little, fluffy, white, buttery enemy waiting to pounce at any moment. But did he throw away his biscuit? No. Then he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on it, lest it try and escape. As though he was persistently testing his will, Ed would keep the biscuit on his desk to sit and grow stale as a frequent affirmation that he didn’t need that pile of empty carbs.

In the world of information, there are thousands of biscuits all around us waiting to be eaten. It’s up to us to choose whether to chow down or to stare at them with contempt.

Imagine a world where liberals stare at Keith Olbermann’s show in the airport, not eagerly awaiting a confirmation of their beliefs, but in contempt for what these shows really are: biscuits in broccoli’s clothing. Or conservatives asking to shut off the O’Reilly Factor at the bar because it may ensnare them in a closed epistemic loop. Or Apple fans going on a gadget blog fast for the weeks surrounding the latest iPhone announcements in order to make a more rational decision about how to spend their next $600. Those are the decisions that people who are trying to have healthy information diets make. We should be staring at these dopamine delivery services with as much contempt as Ed does his biscuits.

The result of going on a healthy information diet is better health and a better life. The next few chapters introduce the concepts and the framework for achieving that. They’re designed to build the literacy and skills required to do it, and include recommendations for the habits it takes to consume and live well in a world of abundant information.

You’ll have more time to do things you enjoy, and you’ll spend less time doing the things you don’t. You’ll also likely live longer by reducing the things that cause you stress or cause you to make poor decisions. Because you’ll be consuming critically and deliberately, you’ll be able to even make better decisions when it comes to things like your food diet. Finally, you may be less at risk for a variety of mental health diseases like depression and a host of anxiety and mood disorders.

We need to get something straight before we jump in to what a healthy information diet looks like, though: fasting is not dieting.

It’s good to disconnect—everybody needs a good vacation. But unplugging, “Internet sabbaticals,” “social media vacations,” and “email bankruptcies” are all ways to avoid the real problem: our own bad habits. Ask any nutritionist, and they’ll tell you that a diet isn’t about not eating—it’s about changing your consumption habits.

Being thin isn’t the point of a good diet, either; it’s about a healthy lifestyle. Our obsession with weight rather than nutrition has us confused and lined up to be taken advantage of by shucksters in the bookstore promising us that we can lose weight and look just like the airbrushed people on the book’s cover if we just follow their simple, easy, attainable plan.

Let’s not fall into the same trap with an information diet. Just like a normal, healthy food diet, an information diet is not about consuming less; it’s about consuming right. The next few chapters of the book describe a framework for building a healthy information consumption lifestyle for yourself.

There are many possible ways to do this, and the chapters that follow are but a recommendation that comes from my own personal experience, and the experiences of others whom I’ve interviewed.

We’re now moving from the theoretical to the practical. I would love to say that much of this is backed up by neuroscience and psychology, and some of it is, but most of it isn’t—it’s instead based on what I’ve found works for me. Though if our brains can be rewired by poor information consumption habits, then one must presume that we can rewire our brains with good information consumption habits to do the opposite.

My recommendations are just recommendations. The key is to find an information diet that works for you. Pollan’s “Eat. Not too much. Mostly plants” exhoration is a helpful framework but not a strict diet. You can take that, and use it to build your own food diet. Here’s my rendition:

Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.

The Infovegan Way

In biology, the trophic pyramid is a simple construct we use to think about how energy flows through the food chain. In the food world, the people eating strictly at the bottom of the trophic pyramid are called vegans—and that’s exactly what we want to emulate with our information consumption. Building on that philosophy, I coined a term in 2010—infoveganism—and started a blog called Infovegan.com to describe this lifestyle. Infovegans try to emulate the consumption habits and ethical habits of vegans in the world of information.

I’ll admit: it’s quite an intimidating term. A lot of people view veganism as an extreme diet, and for some, it triggers visceral reactions. Veganism is not without controversy. Even some food vegans take offense at the term, either angered at the co-opting of their name, or pointing out that the metaphor isn’t perfect: lots of vegan foods are highly processed.

If you can get past the baggage that the term has, infoveganism is a valid description of what we’re trying to do. Like a vegan diet, infoveganism connotes that there’s more to the choice of going on an information diet than seeking a healthy lifestyle. It’s also a moral decision.

At the heart of veganism is ethics. Vegans largely believe that animals, as living creatures, deserve basic moral consideration. Eating meat, they claim, has all kinds of moral implications: animal cruelty, high carbon consumption, and support of an industry without much concern for public health.

Agree with the vegans or not, you have to respect their stance. It captures perfectly what we’re trying to do here with an information diet: respect the content providers that consistently provide us with good info-nutrients by sticking only to those providers, and avoiding everything else.

Like veganism, infoveganism requires conscious consumption, planning, and to a greater extent, sharpened and honed skills. To be a vegan means you’ve got to consistently put yourself in situations where you can maintain your diet. You cannot simply agree to go to McDonald’s to grab lunch unless your diet is to consist entirely of french fries. You’ve got to know how to cook good-tasting vegan recipes, and know what kinds of food might be sneaking animal products in.

Being an infovegan means mastering data literacy—knowing where to get appropriate data, and knowing what to do with it, using the right kinds of tools. It means working to make sure you’re not put into situations where you’re forced to consume overly processed information.

It means that when you are consuming processed information, you consistently check the ingredients—if you’re reading news on a new medicare proposal in Congress, it means you want to take a look at the bill itself, not just what the Huffington Post has to say about it.

Finally, it means a moral choice for information consumption: opting out of a system that’s at least morally questionable, for a different way—a way that chooses to shun factory farmed information, politically charged affirmations—and choosing to support organizations interested in providing information consumers with source-level information and reporting that contains more truth than point-of-view.