We’ve adjusted our information culture such that we now expect information to be free to the consumer. But that free information comes with a much higher cost: advertising. A healthy information diet contains as few advertisements as possible. The economics of advertisement-based media make it so that our content producers must draw eyeballs in on every piece of content, and that results in sensationalism.
Sensationalizing content tends to degrade its quality. That’s not the only cost, though: because advertising persuades us, over time, to buy things that we wouldn’t ordinarily buy, the cost of consuming ad- supported content is higher than we think. I know I’ve ordered a pizza or two from my local pizza joint after watching a television commercial for Pizza Hut.
The reality is that so much of our information—even information we pay for—comes along with advertisements, and it’s nearly impossible to escape advertising completely. Our routes to work and our walks down the street are filled with advertising, and even if we manage to escape those, our trusty letter-carrier delivers more directly to our homes for us to see.
Part of a healthy information diet is respect for good content, and a disrespect for advertisements. We have to reward our honest, nutritious content providers with financial success if we’re going to make significant changes. I subscribe to ConsumerReports.org and NationalGeographic.com as a paying member because they provide good, high-quality, and mostly ad-free content to their subscribers.
A healthy information dieter most certainly won’t sign up to receive advertisements—though many of us do. Our email boxes are filling up not just with spam, but with the latest travel deals from Expedia and specials from JC Penny and Amazon.com. Unsubscribe from these lists, or create a filter or rule in your email client to remove them from your inbox.
While it’s likely impossible to be informed and ad-free, it ought to be something to strive for. To limit your exposure to advertising alongside content, I recommend using tools like Readability.com. Readability gives you the ability to remove distraction from content—it removes advertising completely from any article you’re reading, gives you a more readable typeface, and adjusts the width of each article to make it easier to read.
Readability incorporates another application called Instapaper in its service. It is a similar tool that also allows you click a button on your web browser and move the article to your mobile device. With Instapaper, you can find articles you’d like to read, and read them more easily and more free from the distractions of advertisements and suggested reading headlines on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device, or through Instapaper’s service on the Web.
Knowing that they’re circumventing the current advertising distribution model of information, Readability charges a minimum membership fee of $5.00 per month that you can increase to however much you want. It takes 30% of the membership fee as its own, then allocates the remaining 70% to the content providers that you read through the service. It’s an invisible, transparent way to support content providers without having to wade through advertisements.
The websites of all content providers are designed to keep you reading, and to expose you to the most advertising impressions possible. It’s why they split articles up into several pages, and why when you scroll down to the end of an article, you’re plied with more enticing articles to read.
Instapaper and Readability help to reduce your exposure to these time-sucks, and help you retain a sense of conscious consumption. The key part of these tools is that they make it easier for you to focus on what it is that you want to focus on, and eliminate the distractions you’d normally encounter. They make conscious consumption easy—instead of blindly surfing the Web and reacting to what’s being thrown at you, you can instead shop for content, select the things you want to read, and then have a longer reading session free from distraction.
Diversity
Processed information isn’t the only thing to avoid. If we are comparing an information diet to a food diet, then affirmation of what you already believe is the mind’s sugar. A healthy information diet means seeking out diversity, both in topic area and in perspective.
A healthy information diet means affirming our beliefs only to an extent, keeping a watchful eye on our own fanaticism, and soaking up as much challenge to our beliefs as we possibly can. Getting perspectives that agree with you is one thing, but getting
Fried chicken and ice cream are okay to eat every once in a while—at most, a few times a year when you’re celebrating or feeling particularly down and just need some comfort food. The same goes for the news sources that provide you with the most comfort and information, or even antagonize you. Recognize them as primarily entertainment, and treat them like rare, special servings rather than as something representative of your daily intake.
Striving for synthesis is necessary, and that means actively encouraging a diversity of opinion at all levels of your information diet. Remember the story of Eli Pariser and the filter bubble: we never want a personalization algorithm to start thinking that we’re only interested in hearing viewpoints from one particular side, one particular class of people, or one particular topic or issue.
Asynchronous social networks (ones where you can follow someone without them following you back) like Twitter and Google+ allow you to craft a diverse set of information inputs. You can choose to balance your inputs by following people with a different background or point of view than yourself and your closest friends to get a better perspective, or to learn where people who are different than you are coming from.
Without constant attention to perspective diversity, we assure ourselves mutual intellectual sycophanticide. Because human beings tend to self-select into self-reinforcing groups, tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to get not only constant updates from our friends, but also constant affirmations of our beliefs. Only through constant pruning, selection, and conscious clicking can we make them work for us.
In other words, the only thing to be fundamentally opposed to is fundamentalism itself. To help counter this, I keep a bias journal on my computer, but you could just as easily have it written down on paper if you like. In it, I keep my firm positions and values—stuff I find to be absolute. It’s just a simple, noncategorized list of strong biases I may have. Here are some of mine:
Affordable access to quality healthcare is a fundamental right
Innovation in the private sector will always outperform innovation in government
Large organizations are less interested in the individual than small ones
Strong affinity for Google products (could be because I get invited to speak at their conferences)
Strong affinity towards technical solutions for social problems
Men who wear brightly colored Pumas are annoying
Some biases are stronger than others, of course, but what’s important is that you’re honest with yourself about what your biases are. Some of them could be deeply private, but you don’t have to share your list. What’s important is that you keep the list, are explicit about it, and constantly look to find data and people that challenge your biases—and prescribe yourself enough time to encounter them.
It’s also important to seek out diverse topics of information, as the synthesis of information from different fields helps us create better ideas. It also helps keep us from losing our social breadth—so we have more to talk about than the specialized knowledge of our particular fields. Introduce some new ones into your information diet. I find three resources particularly useful in this regard.
The first is the Khan Academy. Started by Salman Khan in 2006 in order to tutor his young cousins, the site now features over 2,600 small lectures on anything from basic subjects like arithmetic and European history to advanced subjects like organic chemistry, the Paulson bailout, and the Geithner plan to solve the banking crisis.
Being an infovegan means acquiring the basic knowledge you need in order to understand what the data is telling you. The Khan Academy opens the door and lets you in. It’s not a good stopping point, but it’s an excellent way to pick up the basics of a subject that will give you the knowledge you need in order to conduct further
