Mass affirmation is the refined sugar of the mind—I’m not talking about the kind of relatively rare positive affirmation you get from friends or family, telling you that you’re loved and respected. Rather, it’s the mass affirmation: the affirmations you get that aren’t intended for you specifically, the stuff that television is best at, but also permeates through all of our information delivery mechanisms. The suppliers that make a living telling you how right you are are the ones you ought to avoid the most.
I try to limit myself to no more than 30 minutes a day of mass affirmation, and strive to consume much less. It means making some tough choices, and letting go of some things you might enjoy. At a maximum of a half- hour a day, for some liberals, it means having to make the dreaded decision of choosing between Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a regimen of DailyKos. For the conservative, it may mean having to pick between Fox and Friends for a half-hour in the morning, and a half-hour of Bill O’Reilly in the evening.
Consume Locally
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A healthy information diet means the avoidance of overprocessed information. A healthy information dieter constantly tries to remove these junk dealers from the consumption chain. That means either consuming locally or working consistently to remove distance to the things that you investigate.
Consuming low on the metaphorical trophic information pyramid doesn’t mean just sticking closer to the facts; it also means that it’s easier to stick close to the facts when you stick close to home. The further away from home you get, the more attention you have to pay to how many operators have been involved in getting you that information.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, once quipped, to the alarm of many an activist: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,”[84] and while I too bemoan the trivialization of famine, genocide, and HIV—he has a point. You alone can go get the squirrel and clean it up and prevent your neighborhood from smelling like dead animal. Chances are, you’re unable to solve famine, rid the continent of Africa from evil warlords, and cure HIV all by yourself. Local news is more actionable and relevant to the individual than global issues.
Luckily, there’s a renaissance going on in the world of local news—new tools allow you to get online and see news and information down to the narrowest geographic criteria possible: your block. Today, major cities and government agencies are releasing information by the gigabyte that informs us on the real goings-on in our neighborhoods.
If you’re in one of the dozens of cities lucky enough to be covered by Everyblock, I highly recommend it as an important daily source of information. The site aggregates dozens of data feeds that come from local governments and turns them into an easy-to-read, relatively opinion-free way of seeing what’s going on at the block level—and you’d be surprised how much information there is about your single block.
Everything from bulk trash pickups to police reports to photos taken in your neighborhood to recent real estate listings are available for you. You register for the service, plug in your address, and tell the service whether you are interested in getting information about your city, your neighborhood, or the area within an eight-block, four-block or even one-block radius of where you live.
The site also allows you to post messages to other people in your neighborhood so you can talk about the issues affecting your real, local community. It makes the information that comes out of your community immediately actionable, and allows people to connect with their neighbors easily.
Beyond Everyblock, your city may have its own data catalog available for you to peruse. Most major cities—like D.C., Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York—have them, and more are on the way. To find yours, do a Google search for your city’s name and the phrase “data catalog” and you’ll likely stumble upon it. If you cannot find one, try searching for the email address of your local government’s CIO (Chief Information Officer), writing to them, and asking them to make the data feeds that they have available online.
Public data is your data—you fund its collection with your tax dollars, and it ought to be taken out of the silos in the underbellies of city halls across the country, and into the light of day. Most sunshine laws—laws that require governments to respond to citizen requests to be open—require government officials to respond to citizen requests for information. Be an activist, and ask for its release.
It’s hard to be factually incorrect about this kind of data, and reading about parking in your neighborhood may seem quite dull. Over time though, you’re able to spot trends: observing a string of car thefts on your block may yield you some pertinent information—certainly more pertinent to your safety than whether the federal government is going to invest in high-speed rail.
For news, reading your local paper, watching your local news when it’s on, or reading local blogs isn’t a bad idea, but keep in mind: you’re now becoming a secondary or tertiary consumer of information, and you’re more subject to succumbing to your own bias and other forms of misreporting.
While this information is less likely to be as manufactured as what you’ll find in the national and international news, it will still require some work in order to make sure it’s trustworthy and verifiable. In order to consume this information safely, you must do the extra work of investigating source material, figuring out the intent of the person delivering that information to you, and determining that information’s effects on you.
The local news renaissance is also a renaissance in specialized, deep wells of information. Instead of grazing on global and national news, and information about people you don’t know and who don’t care about you, shift your information consumption to local news and people who do care about you. Try to achieve deeper relationships with the information you’re consuming: if you must consume information about the affairs of people and places far away, try slicing off a niche, and developing a mastery of it.
But geographically local information isn’t the only kind of local information we can get to. Socially proximate information also sits near the bottom of our informational trophic pyramid. Like geographically local information, socially local information—information about the people closest to us—is actionable, relevant, and important to our connections with other human beings.[85]
The Web gives us new ways to check in on those we know and love, even when they’re far away. But like all other forms of information, social media comes with consequences. We have to filter the information that our friends are sharing about themselves and the information that they’re resharing from elsewhere.
It’s good to fine-tune your lists of friends and acquaintances and fortunately, all of the major social networks give us this ability. Facebook’s groups and lists, Google+’s circles, and Twitter’s list functionalities make it so that we can sort our friends and view our social networks through the lenses of what’s important.
If you are a user of one or more of these services, take an hour or two and sort through your lists of friends. Create a group, list, or circle for family members, another for close friends, another for work colleagues, and another for people you’d like to get to know better, and read those posts consciously during set periods of the day, rather than plunging yourself into an ever-growing stream of incoming media that your brain will be unable to resist.
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