Because information is social, information diets have far more severe social effects. Just ask Alfred Dreyfus.
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Jewish man, and an unknown captain in the French army, who was rushed to Court Marshall and life imprisonment for allegedly leaking French secrets to the Germans. The evidence against him? A crumpled note in a trash can with a single initial on it. Though his handwriting didn’t match the note, he was accused of disguising his own handwriting, and exiled to Devil’s Island.
The French were swept up in a divisive debate over the man’s guilt. The debate gave birth to a new word,
The head of the intellectuals was French writer Emile Zola, who famously wrote, “J’Accuse…!” in an open letter to the President of the Republic, describing the nonsense of the case that would eventually become known as the Dreyfus Affair.
It took 12 years of bitter public fighting for those intellectuals to win, and more for the French to recover. Dreyfus and the French are not the only victims of fights like this. The genocides in Rwanda were fed by hate speech on the radio. Hitler’s embrace of the new media of film empowered Nazism. Humanity’s darkest moments are the ones in which masses of people had the worst information diets.
Today, we’re fighting a million Dreyfus Affairs with one another. Rather than focusing on issues, we’ve tribalized into a million little rights and wrongs. In Washington, our completely polarized electorate is distracted from serious, solvable problems because those problems aren’t salient or interesting enough for them to pay attention. What makes for good politics doesn’t make for good democracy.
Why would someone pay attention to the major problems that we have with the federal acquisition regulation (which directs how government spends money on contractors) when we have to “win” on the debt ceiling vote? Why talk about measurable successes in our classrooms when we can have fights over the teachers’ right to form a union?
You might argue that stupid people, willing to believe whatever they want to believe, will always exist. You might further argue that evildoers will always be there to attempt to take advantage of them. You’re right. But the problem is getting more severe because the economics of how we get our information have changed so much that it’s not just the stupid people who are getting duped anymore.
The only way we can solve the problem of information obesity is to change the economics of information. And while it’s not going to solve itself overnight, it’s an issue that, with enough demand from the consumer, will begin to change. Just look at what’s happened with the healthy food and local food movements.
Welcome to the Vast Rational Conspiracy
Part of the reason people have poor food diets is that the food that’s cheap tends to be the food that’s the worst for us. Thus, there’s a strong relationship between poverty and obesity in the United States; it turns out that our poorest counties are also our most obese. But there is a way to change that.
As a result of consumers demanding healthier food, and a public concern about obesity, Walmart is attempting to cut up to 25% of the salt, fat, and sugar from its foods in order to combat obesity. Because of demand, Walmart is now the single largest provider of local, organic foods to the market. The result: the entire food industry is changing and following suit so its foods can be sold in Walmart stores.
It’s not just taxes and smoking bans on cigarettes that drive down the number of smokers in the United States. There’s also social consequence to smoking. Now, smoking isn’t just something that causes cancer: for many, it’s something that’s socially unacceptable—a cultural faux pas. The smokers have been dismissed to our back alleys, behind the buildings. More and more, they’re forced to hide their habit, which in turn creates fewer smokers.
We can do the same with our information providers, but only if we show consumer demand for high quality, source- and fact-driven information. The market will move, but only if we show that there’s a positive economic outcome from doing so. If we start to change our information consumption habits, the whole market will change to follow suit. If Fox and MSNBC are no longer rewarded for being affirmation distributers, and their ratings start to change as a result, it will have consequences not just for the information dieters, but also for the public en mass.
An information diet isn’t just something that’s good for you. An appropriate diet is a social cause that yields a better ecology of mind—one that’s more immune to contempt and hate, and to the tragic consequences of what those emotions beget.
If we begin to demand an end to factory-farmed content, and instead demonstrate a willingness to pay for more content like investigative journalism and a strong, independent public press, we’ll not only force the market to follow our lead, we’ll build a better, stronger, and healthier democracy. The high-end consumer can drag the market along with it.
If we make a healthy information diet as normal and obvious as something like a healthy food diet, then those that aren’t consuming healthily will begin to feel social pressure. Nobody wants to be ignorant or even have the appearance of ignorance. The social consequences of being seen as ignorant are far more significant than the social consequences of smoking or obesity.
With another divisive election around the corner, I’d like the consequence of you reading this book to not only be your going on an information diet, but also to your starting or joining a local campaign for information dieting with three goals in mind:
To increase the digital literacy of our communities with the skills I outlined in Chapter 7: the ability to search, process, filter, and share.
To encourage the consumption of local information that’s low on our metaphorical trophic pyramid.
To economically reward good information providers, and to provide economic consequence for those who provide affirmation over information.
This kind of campaign mustn’t revolve around a particular person or personality, but instead be driven from the ground up. As much as I’d like to use the political skills I’ve learned in the past 10 years to drive a traditional campaign, doing so would go against the principles of the book. Instead, a campaign like this has to be driven at both the geographically and socially local levels: neighborhood by neighborhood and network by network.
Conspiracy in Six Easy Steps
Share this book. If we’re going to do this right, then we need more people to know what a healthy information diet looks like. After you’re done with this book, share it with a friend—or, if you’re feeling generous (to both the friend and your humble author), buy them their own copy. The principles of digital literacy, humor, attention fitness, and a healthy information diet need to spread if we’re going to succeed.
Organize. There may be an infodiet group in your area. Check out http://informationdiet.com/local to see if one exists near you. If not, start a Google Discussion group at http://groups.google.com. Name it something that’s easily discoverable by people in your community: “InformationDiet Austin” or “InformationDiet East Bay.” If you send me a link to your group via Twitter (I’m @cjoh), I’ll make sure to link to it on http://informationdiet.com/local for other people to find.
Focus and be civil. In your group, keep the focus on the mission: digital literacy, local information, and changing the economics of your information providers. Your group should practice healthy information diets during your discussions; it’s useful to be somewhat strict moderators. Your discussion group should never degenerate into political discussions—that’s something that there are plenty of other venues for, and as a group, it’s better to steer those discussions to the places where they’d be more appropriate.
Meet. Like, face to face. Anonymity is useful when speaking truth to power and
