The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

by Clay A. Johnson

The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear. Just as we have grown morbidly obese on sugar, fat, and flour―so, too, have we become gluttons for texts, instant messages, emails, RSS feeds, downloads, videos, status updates, and tweets. We're all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness. The Information Diet shows you how to thrive in this information glut―what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential for everyone who strives to be smart, productive, and sane. In The Information Diet , you

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Psychology, Self Help, Personal Development, Productivity, Sociology

150 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Rebecca Schwarz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this three stars because there are a few people I can think of that should read this for the distinction he makes between good information and junk information. And for his theory about our tendency to over-consume information and all things Internet just like we tend to over-consume junk food.

It's not getting more stars because it's really a great long-form essay that's been padded out to a slim book. Ironically, this book would have been better if it had gone on a diet!

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sad to see so many people here quibbling over the food/obesity analogy. Here's what I think of the analogy: it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't work in some ways, but who cares? Most metaphors don't. The issue raised by this book is the most important issue facing America today. I'm not prone to hyperbole, I really believe that.

I'm giving this book 4 stars despite the following:
1) The book contains a surprising number of grammatical errors.
2) The entire 'prescription' section is weak (i.e. - the second half of the book).
3) Mr. Johnson veers off into addressing productivity/time-saving for no apparent reason.
4) The food analogy is beaten to death by the 50th page and, as many a smarty-pants reviewer here has pointed out, it's imperfect.

But seriously, self-indoctrination may not be identical to obesity in every way, but it's just as damaging a problem, and it's a problem that's getting worse.
Mr. Johnson is dead on when he says that people are creating their own realities. Cruise around the internet and read the articles on right-wing and left-wing news sites. Listen to the middle-class Tea Party member who is positive that Obama has raised his/her taxes. Listen to the lefty who's read everything in the Zinn-Chomsky canon and is convinced that the US is most evil, exploitative empire the world has ever seen. Hell, visit the comment section of any online article.

We're at a point where the U.S. body politic is comprised mainly of two groups:
1) People that are apathetic / low-information.
2) People that have huge amounts of information from a single viewpoint, associate exclusively with people who share that viewpoint, have that viewpoint affirmed constantly, and then are *stunned* by the stupidity of those who (inexplicably, to them) don't share their worldview.

Anyway, the point of this book, or at least what I would hope people take away from it, is to beware the 2nd group above. Beware the well-informed yet narrow-minded. They are bad for you, bad for the country and more dangerous than their apathetic brethren.

So yeah, the book is flawed. I get that. But don't let the superficial flaws distract from what the author is really trying to say.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a case of Brilliant Metaphor, the author coins the phrase (and title) "information diet," comparing high-emotion, low-fact information (the kind popular on social media and partisan "news" outlets) to junk food.

In the same way that cheap and tasty (but unbalanced/non-nutritious) calories have displaced less processed foods and triggered an epidemic of obesity, the author explains, over-processed, easy-to-find infotainment has greatly contributed to our current social woes in what he calls "information obesity."

He then races from talking point to talking point, hastily sketching out a case to support his genuinely lovely metaphor without ever digging deep enough to actually make the case.

The painful thing is that I think he is right, but his lightweight, low-rigor approach only works when preaching to the choir.

It could work well as a quick starting guide for your own investigation into the points he raises, but functions more as a syllabus than a reference.

This book had a lot of promise but fails to execute

[Kevin Faustino · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I didn't waste my time reading this book. It is heavly focused on politics and has little benifit to the reader. The only chapter really well done was the one about content farms.

Do yourself a favour and skip this one. I would just look at the list of helpful tools from the blog:

http://resources.informationdiet.com/...

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Information - you're doing it wrong.

Clay Johnson's book is about the information you take in, and the effects it has on you and society. Using the analogy of food and nutrition, he argues that the data we are consuming is the equivalent of processed food, full of fats, salt, sugar, and all other sorts of nasties.

His ire falls on the multitude of websites pushing bite-sized snippets of junk out into the world, the headlines that enrage more than enlighten, the link-bait trash that we seem powerless not to look at. But more than that, he points the finger at mainstream meadia such as Fox News and MSNBC, and, of course, at politicians of all stripes.

US-centric though the book is, it's hard to argue with many of the problems Johnson highlights in the first section. The content farm 'news' sites that dominate the biggest online media players are, indeed, pretty dire. Fox News and MSNBC realising that it was more profitable to hire big name pundits who affirm their viewer's opinions than to hire journalists to find real news was a genuine blow for public debate. The politicians that create their own world for themselves and their supporters create tribes that see everyone else as the heathen to be crushed. The urgency of email, Twitter and Facebook changes has damaged our ability to concentrate, and avoid the lure of the new.

But identifying the problems is the easy bit - if nothing else, people have been bemoaning the way news, both online and offline, has been going for years. The difficult part is figuring out what any of us can do about it.

When it comes to your own consumption, the book has some good tips. They range from cutting down your total information consumption, building the ability to concentrate, and making sure you don't get lost in the rabbithole of email or social media. However, they're not particularly new. If you're fed up with what's on tv, then cancel your cable. If you're fed up with what passes as news online, then stop reading it. Use a clock to make sure you don't spend forever on your email. Simple advice, but hardly revolutionary.

Beyond that, there are some ideas about improving the quality of what you consume after you have reduced the quantity. Johnson talks about going direct to source data, focusing on local information, and paying to access low-ad sites. He also suggests deliberately seeking out information and viewpoints that differ from your own, to avoid falling into a closed loop, and to have something to check your biases against.

I have some issues with this area. Sometimes source data obscures more than enlightens, and local facts can be meaningless without knowing historical or wider context. Johnson has an aversion to people getting in the way of you and the source, but sometimes an interpreter in the way is a good thing. Yes, an economics expert (for example) will have his own bias, but they also bring a much greater depth of knowledge and experience to bear on data. Their insights can be much more valuable than just a set of figures.

(Johnson mentions the trophic pyramid here, regarding the energy flow through a food chain, noting that only 10% of available energy is taken up on each step. Absolutely true, but to stress the analogy to breaking point, it also tends to have a higher energy density as you go up the chain. That's why antelopes spend all day eating, while lions can laze in the sun. I don't want to spend all day scouring data, so someone to distill it down for me can be very useful.)

An interesting section here concerns the act of producing information, rather than consuming it. I like this idea very much, as you can probably tell from the fact I'm, um, writing.

But when Johnson moves on to trying to have an effect outside of yourself, he seems on much less certain territory. The book ends on a forlorn call to try to encourage others to take up this information diet too, to try to break them out of a closed loop. This seems an unlikely outcome. To have a real effect, the very people who are happiest in their closed loop are the ones who would need to deliberately choose to take in opposing information - something which Johnson himself looks at earlier in the book, citing a study which suggests opposing information doesn't change someone's opinion, it simply reinforces it.

Moreover, Johnson's view seems both utopian and defeatist, a remarkable achievement. On the one hand, he suggests that by spreading this new information diet, the divisive nature of current US politics can be curtailed, as pragmatism increases. On the other, he advocates ignoring the big issues dominating politics (as your efforts will be crowded out by the 'information obese') and concentrating only on small, practical changes - a retreat to technocracy.

The problem with this is that technocrats don't change the world, they just make it a bit more efficient. Yes, as Johnson argues, there seems to be a scalability problem with US political representation (though as a foreigner, I can't really say) but making it easier to contact your representatives won't help them with the volume of data they need to consider.

And, ultimately, the technical details aren't as important as the issues Johnson suggests ceding to the zealots. Efficiency and technical matters will improve, simply as the expectations of the politicians change - and this will mainly be because of the tools they are used to using (which explains why this seems a terribly slow process to everyone under 50 - we're the whippersnappers).

But the big issues, the ones that come down to two sides yelling at each other, remain important. To use health care as an example, finding a more efficient way to deliver the computer system that manages insurance isn't going to solve that argument, which boils down to what it is right for a country to provide for its citizens. Regulatory issues won't be solved by finding a better way to monitor financial institutions, if one side doesn't agree with regulations in the first place.

Yes, arguments like this are messy, and can get dirty and vindictive, with misinformation or misunderstanding thrown around by all sides - but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be had, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't take part in them. To give in, walk away, and fiddle round the edges just means your views won't be heard at all.

Johnson gives an example of his own closed loop, following his time campaigning for Dean. He got into an argument with his uncle, a Fox News devotee, at Thanksgiving dinner, because both sides thought if only the other person had the 'right' facts, they'd change their view. Naturally, it devolved into a shouting match, and Johnson cites it as a time he realised providing the "facts" doesn't work, because people will have their own set of "facts", and see them through their own lens.

Unfortunately, his view seems to only have moved to the idea that if you provide the "facts" for longer, people will become pragmatic, fairer, and more willing to compromise. People don't work like that. Opinions can be held for rational or irrational reasons, and resist change. Ideas can be poorly explained. Your life experience, regardless of the information you now take in, can shape your views to the point they will not change.

People disagree, and they always will. The only thing we agree on is that voting on it is the best way to decide what we do - and that's why we have politics. It's no place for a gentleman, but it's the best system we have. That's why we all need to stay involved in it.

The Information Diet does well in identifying the problems we all sometimes feel with being overwhelmed with information, and getting lost down the various timesinks we all have. As a self-help book, aimed at improving your own consumption, it works well. But as an idea for changing the world, it falls flat.

[Ian Samuel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a skinny-fat volume of pop neurology. Or, no, wait: it's a series of short paragraphs from a time management seminar in 2007. Wait, no. It's a pat paen to openness in government (sorta) and citizen activism (of a sort). Hmm, well... Truth to tell, it's best to think of this book as three long essays, none of which have virtually anything to do with one another, all three of which are significantly longer than they ought to be, and most of which are pockmarked with poor writing and outright misstatements of fact.

The layout of the book is as follows. In the first third or so, the book explains the Problem To Be Addressed. This is preceded by the traditional wind-up that all pop nonfiction must begin with these days, to pad out the length; here, it's a pointless exegesis on the dawn of industrial agriculture in America and the rise of the obesity problem. This gets us to the appetizer: Johnson's description of the problem of "information obesity." (This cutesy neologism is not the first, last, or worst that you will have to endure in this volume, I am sorry to say. I will not mention the very worst of them here, because it is too awful to repeat.)

The basic idea, at least the first one, is that people are misinformed, often very badly so. This is hardly news, of course. Johnson also lumps in with this problem a basically unrelated one, which is that many people are very distractible and/or very distracted, and the modern world offers very many distractions indeed, like email. Which is also a familiar observation by now. Finally, Johnson drops into this brew a few brief observations on common reasoning errors (such as confirmation bias) and cribs the work of Eli Pariser on "Filter Bubbles" (who was, in turn, basically just cribbing from Cass Sunstein's "Republic.com," and his concerns about Nicholas Negroponte's "The Daily Me"---all of that was about fifteen years ago). This is also the section where "epistemic closure," a term that became annoying for a while some months back and then mercifully went away, gets discussed, except in Johnson's hands it just starts to mean (as it also eventually did when it was first invented) that people get stuff wrong sometimes and are stubborn about it. That's the Problem Section.

These problems, of course, have no obvious connection to each other, and Johnson doesn't really explain at all how they're related. People are distractible and check their email too much? I agree. (And, I am glad to say, that no longer qualifies as an original insight. Merlin Mann and Tim Ferriss, call your offices.) But what does that have to do with a guy who's holding a sign that says "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare?" And what does either one of those things have to do with, e.g., the availability heuristic (the tendency to assign great weight to information that's easy to call to mind)? One is a problem of discipline; one is a problem of ignorance; and the last is just a decision-making process that can sometimes lead a person with even correct information astray. But never mind. Johnson barrels along, lumping all three together as symptoms of information obesity (an inapt metaphor, by the way: a person checking email a lot may indeed be consuming too much information, but a guy who doesn't know that Medicare is a government program has too little information, not too much, and anyway a person susceptible to confirmation bias has neither too little nor too much information but rather a completely separate problem).

By the time this first third is done, you probably won't have learned anything new, but you will have noticed several things. First, the prose style is just atrocious. The book is chock-full of folsky examples that go on for several sentences too long, and which seem to introduce every other concept. Johnson tries mightily at humor, but you've heard these jokes before: he praises the Daily Show for feeding us "small nuggets of truth wrapped in delicious, bacon-like hilariousness." Ha ha! Bacon, guys!! Daily Show!! Moreover, an idea or point is rarely addressed for more than a few paragraphs; it's dropped out there, loosely explained, and then Johnson moves on, unlikely to ever mention it again. The effect is of reading a series of loosely connected blog posts, not a book. There are also strange non sequiturs everywhere that crop up and then never come back: email apnea, agnotology, "confident ignorance," and more. Each is given a cute-sounding phrase out of Malcolm Gladwell's reject bin ("reality dysmorphia" is another genuine groaner) and then it's on to the next. This is a problem not just because it makes the book feel halting, random, and disjointed, although it does; it's a problem because several of these observations undercut arguments made later in the book, which Johnson either does not realize or cannot defend. More on that in a minute.

In part two, you get to the book's main event: a section called, appropriately enough, "The Information Diet." This is supposed to be the cure to those loosely-related problems before. Is it? Well, first, to describe Johnson's recommendations. First out of the gate, Johnson recommends that you... learn how to use Google. (No, really.) Well, OK. Then he reminds you not to believe everything you read on the internet, and encourages you to use what he calls "filters" such as "what is the intent of the author? Is it to inform you, or is it to make a point?" Which isn't wrong, really, but has that "research paper assigned in high school, being told how to use Internet sources" feel to it. Most people would call it common sense. Johnson also recommends that you produce content of your own, to test your ideas and opinions.

But wait. Stop briefly and ask whether this is likely to solve the problems Johnson spent the first third laying out. People are misinformed, and oftentimes (due to confirmation bias), giving them more information just hardens their (wrong) opinions. How is telling a misinformed person suffering from confirmation bias to use Google going to solve anything? How is a mind made up against the reality of climate change going to right itself by asking simple questions like "gee, what's the intent of the author here?" It pretty obviously won't. Good-hearted but extraordinarily picayune techniques like learning to Google with more gusto are not going to address any of the things Johnson talked about early on. But onward.

Johnson then goes on to address "attention fitness," which is usually called by the shorter and older name "focus." To his credit, this section does at least clearly address one of the problems he mentioned earlier. But it begins with what is basically just a long advertisement for RescueTime, a piece of software that monitors what you're doing on your computer. Johnson then goes into some by-now-very-familiar advice not to check email so much, to silence your phone, to check social networks at set times, install AdBlock, and so on. If this is the first time you've heard any of this advice, then I hope it will do you some good. But if you're interested in a book like this, I'd be very surprised if you're just now finding out that you shouldn't have 5,000 people's Twitter updates pushed automatically to your phone. This closes with a truly mind-numbing section that can be summed up as, "you need to practice at focusing on what you're doing for longer and longer periods, and to take scheduled breaks."

Johnson's next "diet" recommendation is to have a "healthy sense of humor." That's hard advice to disagree with, but the chapter (which is at least short---then again, they're all short) comes off primarily as a vehicle to tell a story about how Karl Rove made a self-deprecating joke once. It's also hard advice to connect up with any of Johnson's earlier diagnoses of America's problems (will having a sense of humor solve email apnea?), but by this point, you will have given up on that by-now-foolish hope anyway.

Finally, Johnson has a chapter entitled "How to Consume." It's around this point that the book starts to get truly incoherent and self-contradictory, and never really looks back. One expects that Johnson will explain how to, for example, responsibly stay informed about politics (which is a major theme of his book---and more on that later) in this section. I'd be interested in that, certainly. Wrong: Johnson cops out, explaining that "I don't want to tell you what information to consume," because "that wouldn't be responsible." I'm not sure Johnson understands what the idea of a diet is. When I tell people to go vegan, and they ask what they should eat for breakfast instead of scrambled eggs, I reply "oatmeal, or maybe some fresh fruit and toast." That's what advocating a diet is: giving thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs to different foods. (I don't mean to be overly literal with the metaphor, but then again, perhaps I do. It's a metaphor of Johnson's choosing, and there's no way I could belabor it more than he does.)

Instead, Johnson focuses on procedural generalities---"how to consume" indeed, never "what to consume". He advocates canceling your cable subscription and instead watching TV via Hulu and Netflix, which is sound financial advice (and he spells out the arithmetic in tedious detail, in case you don't believe me---again, the sense is of having to pad out the pages) but plainly has nothing to do with the problem of misinformation, except insofar as not having cable makes it impossible to watch cable news. But can't you watch the Daily Show or Rachel Maddow online if you want? And didn't he spend a whole chapter somewhere back there on the dangers of Internet content farms? Oh, never mind.

Johnson also advocates trying to reduce your "information consumption time" to six hours per day. Which is nice, neutral-sounding advice, except that a person spending six hours reading gold-bug propaganda or end-times demagoguery is a lot worse off than someone who spends twelve hours a day with their nose buried in the Economist and the U.S. Reports. Weirdly, Johnson also appears to count fiction reading right alongside checking the weather, email, and the newspaper as "information consumption time." But that's just bizarre: reading Jane Eyre is not in any sense equivalent to watching Keith Olbermann, and neither are "information" in the same sense that the current time and temperature are "information." There's no attempt to justify or explain this odd lumping, and there's nothing in the earlier chapters to... well, you get the idea.

Johnson also recommends that you "consume locally," which is to say, local news. This is an amusing bit of parallelism to the whole "eat locally" fad, but has a rough landing when he has to explain what it means: according to him, you should be reading about "bulk trash pickups" and "police reports." I wish I were joking. While he admits that "reading about parking in your neighbhorhood may seem quite dull," he also assures you that "over time, 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." That head-scratching line (is he really saying that we should all spend hours scrutinizing police reports to "spot trends?" Isn't that, you know, the police's job? And the point of CompStat, a widely-deployed police data system that everyone kind of knows about by now? And isn't the availability of high-speed mass transit actually fairly relevant to a lot of people?) just sits on the page like a steaming turd, unexplained and evidently not a joke, and Johnson moves on to the next thought. Which manages to be almost as bad: He encourages "watching your local news when it's on," which is the kind of statement only a person who has never watched local news could make. Surely there has never been a more sensationalistic, information-free form of journalism than local television news.

Then comes the book's very odd final section, which has nothing to do with anything that has come before, and is entitled "Social Obesity." It's a short, mostly incoherent essay on the structure of government in the United States. It's hard to summarize, but is easily the worst of the three sections. It contains:

* Outright and alarming misunderstandings of the U.S. Constitution. Johnson claims that the Constitution pegs the number of representatives in the House "to be proportional to population." It does no such thing: Article I says that there shall be no more than one representative per 30,000 people, but it doesn't "peg" anything to anything beyond that. Johnson seems to recognize this, stating that the Congress has from time to time changed the size of the House which of course would be impossible if it were "pegged" in Article I. But then he says the current size of the House can't be changed because getting "two-thirds of Congress to agree to it" would be impossible. But of course you don't need two-thirds of Congress to agree to a change in a statute---just a Constitutional amendment, which Johnson's own tale makes obvious isn't needed. It's a little disturbing to see such fundamental misunderstandings of the governmental process from a guy who made his living in politics and is writing a book, in part, about how to responsibly engage government. Johnson makes great sport mocking people holding misinformed signs, but at least none of those people were paid a book advance to get basic facts of government wrong.

* Dead-ends of thought. The point above, about the size of Congress? It's part of what Johnson calls the "scalability problem," another way of saying that the nation has gotten big, and each Congressman now represents way more people than they used to. But what should we do about it? How can we fix it? Or address it? We shouldn't make Congress bigger, Johnson makes that clear. But what should we do? No idea. The whole section just ends almost in mid-thought and is then, quite literally, never mentioned again. It's like Johnson got interrupted writing this part by the chime of a text message and forgot to finish it.

* Observations about transparency that contradict claims elsewhere in the book. Johnson makes a lot of how transparency can't solve problems because it has a dark side: the information will just be misused by nefarious characters, plus people tend not to do anything with it anyway. You can't just dump raw data on people and expect them to care. That's a good point. Of course, this is the guy who just a little while ago was seemingly encouraging us to set up "John Nash in A Beautiful Mind"-style shacks where we could "spot trends" in local parking enforcement, so I'm not sure what to make of it.

* Downright bad, truly irresponsible advice. Johnson closes this section with a heading on "Bridging the Gap," with advice for citizen activists to follow as they engage government. (If you're wondering what any of this has to do with one's information diet, then I am sorry to tell you that an explanation will not be forthcoming.) Johnson's advice is to concern oneself with small things rather than big things. If you're worried about the national budget deficit, he says, don't concern yourself over the debt-ceiling debate and the proposals to reduce Medicare spending that it generated; rather, quote, work to "change procurement laws so that government can get access to the same things the private sector has without paying and arm and a leg." That is a breathtakingly naive prescription, the sort of homespun wisdom that one would expect from a local news team's "man on the street" interview rather than a sophisticated campaign operative like Johnson. Federal procurement laws aren't the reason we have a structural budget deficit; no serious person thinks that. Johnson's other advice is equally bewildering: for example, he says, if you're worried about the effect of money in politics, you should try and make the Senate file its campaign contributions electronically. Of course, as Johnson notes, the House already does this, and I'm not aware of anyone who thinks that representatives are less tainted by money than senators. But never mind.

* Puzzling, ungrammatical sentences. Try parsing this one: "The thing that's made what Alex de Tocqueville called 'The Great American Experiment,' as on page 135, work is our ability to be pragmatic." Reading this sentence, it's hard not to feel like you're the first person to read it since Johnson typed it, because it's certainly never been glanced at by a copy editor.

* Bland, blame-both-sides stuff that I hope Johnson doesn't actually believe. "Let's take our country back, not from the right or from the left, but from the crazy partisanship both sides. Let's give it to the stewards that have made the country so great, the pragmatists." Thanks, I saw the keynote from 2004, too. This is a sadly naive attitude, of course, one that was memorably satirized a long time ago by the Simpsons: "We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

* One more outright misstatement of fact, just for the road: Johnson says if you're "worried about prisons and civil rights," you should "take note of the fact that our laws are generally distributed and archived by for-profit corporations, making it so that even access to the laws that we must follow are behind paywalls." That's just wrong. No bones about it. The entire United States Code is available at http://uscode.house.gov, in PDF format. The Code of Federal Regulations is also online, for free, and the Supreme Court and all federal courts of appeals post their decisions online, too. What's not there is available in a number of free databases like Cornell's Legal Information Institute (mission statement: "We are a not-for-profit group that believes everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them, without cost. We carry out this vision by publishing law online, for free."). And by the way, how does any of that have a damn thing to do with prisons or civil rights?

This book is, as you might be able to tell, a real let-down. The problems of misinformation in politics and management of information in one's life are heady, interesting subjects. I was looking forward to a serious treatment of them. I can't recommend The Information Diet to anyone who takes what they read seriously; the best that can be said for it is that it went down quickly.

[Abdullahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review Assignment: The Information Diet

Introduction:

John Clay, an author, activist, and a former Washington insider, wrote, the Information Diet, a book that he wants to persuade his readers on how we must consume and process information in the wake of the 21st century. John addresses the transformation that has happened to the information cycle, and the necessity to shift along with, in order to avoid many possible negative consequences. John hopes to achieve this, through the use of an epidemic as a metaphor; an epidemic that is quite familiar to many Americans today; obesity, and lays out their similarities in different interesting ways.

Summery:

In his book, the Information Diet, John attempts to demonstrate the threat posed by what he views as the unregulated, unfiltered, and excessively commercialized information directed against everyone today. John sees strong similarities between the changes that has happened to the agriculture industry, and the one he is afraid now is happening to our information sources. Basing his argument on such observation, John states, “While our collective sweet tooth used to serve us well, in the land of abundance, it’s killing us. As it turns out, the same thing has happened with information. Our sweet tooth for information is no longer serving us well. Surprisingly, it too is killing us. (P.18). John’s thesis is that, mindful utilization of information is essential, necessary, and doable.

The book is divided into three sections. In section one, John illustrates what he thinks the scope of the problem through, the lens of consumption, in section two, he lays out an alternative solution to deal with such challenge, and in section three John demands from his readers to demand a better system of government, and be proactive in thought and in deed.

Evaluation:

John has done a good job of relating the book to the title, by first beginning with a metaphor that gives the reader a sense of relevance. This resonates well throughout the book, and gives the reader a clear map and intent of the author.

To establish a perfect ground for his argument, John credibly addresses the changes and the consequences of obesity; giving the reader the bigger picture of pre and post industrialization of agriculture, and the profound health consequences it brought along with. John puts forth a compelling case by comparing two different scenarios that are quite similar and contrary all at the same time. John begins to arouse curiosity by questioning his reader, “We know we’re products of the food we eat. Why wouldn’t we also be products of the information we consume?”(P.4). This creates a parallel between the two issues, and makes the reader accept the fitting.

What automatically attracts the reader is the manner in which John transitions from food and health related issues to media and information concerns. He comparatively talks about the similar kind of changes that has happened to our information industry. Like the industrial revolution over the farmers, there has been a technological one over the traditional media, John illustrates. To make the reader relate the two industries John says, “Food companies want to provide you with the most profitable food possible that will keep you eating it. While media companies want to provide you with the most profitable information possible that will keep you tuned in, and the result is airwaves filled with fear and affirmation”(P.33).

Although some readers my question the amount of food and weight metaphor John especially invested in section one and two, yet I personally think that was a good choice for two reasons. First, at the beginning of the book John talks about his journey in writing this book and how that journey took him to different fields and places in America. From healthcare activism to political campaigns, and information transparency, that more than anything else might have given him a good background an insight on the level and the magnitude of the problem. Secondly, to draw the attention of his readers, he needs to attach a picture that is quite familiar to everyone at least in America, and obesity makes a perfect sense in this regard.

I truly commend how John kept politics out of his book. This gives the reader the sense that John’s target audience were the both sides of the American politics, and held no reservations when it comes to revealing the facts regarding Washington and its players on both sides of the aisle. This is a plus per se, and gives the reader a sense of credibility and reliance. It is also quite skillful how John asserts and describes few powerful terminologies in his book. Among these, are attention. John quantifies attention, and believes that it can increase or decrease accordingly.He says, “we don’t burn attention, we pay it”(P. 89). John makes new terms such as, “infovegans”(P.77), According to John Infovagans “try to follow the consumption habits of vegans”(P.77), a group of people who avoid consuming animal products on ethical grounds. Being an inforvegan means, according to John being a “data literate”(P.80). Elaborating more on this John argues that we need to know how to search, filter, and synthesize information.

However, although I liked the way John created the parallel between food and information consumption, yet I felt that John failed to convince his reader how overconsumption of food is similar in terms of health, to that of information. Nevertheless, I think it was brilliant how John kept referring the reader back to section one where he laid out the concrete of his argument. For instance, in section two where John presents a set of skills, certain disciplines, and strategies to combat this new challenge, John consecutively compares information diet to that of food diet. For example, while addressing why the reader should undertake the measures of information diet, Johns argues, “Just like a normal, healthy food diet, an information diet is not about consuming less; it is about consuming right”(P.76).

I think it was quite clever the way John structured his book. What I especially liked is how each section dealt with specific and significant part of the book. It was an excellent chronological order that he presented the problem in the first section, offered the solution in the second one, however, I felt that the third section of the book didn’t resonate well to the rest of the book, in order to give the reader the same kind of tone and the texture that the initial argument presented.

This is a good book to read, especially if you are among those who have deep concerns over the benefits and the problems of technology. John addresses variety of sensitive issues, exposes tricks and tips, and offers effective ways to deal with such outcomes. He brings a significant number of years of experience, and demonstrates logics and critical thinking on board. Unlike many other books I’ve read over the years, John has remained mindful about sensitive issues, and kept the controversy out of his work. I finished reading this book with tons of issues to think about. It was an educating and adventurous reading that I recommend others to try.

Citations
Clay, J. (2011). The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption (Kindle Edition ed.). N.p.: O'Reilly Media

[Bdalton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sundown on Friday, March 23 marks the beginning of the third annual Day to Disconnect, when people are urged to turn off their electronic devices and connect with the world around them. Started by a Jewish group called Reboot, the group recommends that the following principles be followed:

Avoid technology.
Connect with loved ones.
Nurture your health.
Get outside.
Avoid commerce.
Light candles.
Drink wine.
Eat bread.
Find silence.
Give back.

I would also add "take action to be a more concious consumer of technology and information". Reading The Information Diet is a great beginning if you accept that as an additional goal.

Clay Johnson is a technology guru. He was the founder of Blue State Digital, the organization that ran Obama's digital campaign. He was the director of the Sunlight Labs, part of the Sunlight Foundation that works to make government data open and available. He also is a man who struggles with digital addictions and has spent some time learning how to be a more thoughtful consumer.

Clay Johnson gives some of the backstory of his life. He worked for the Howard Dean campaign after his mother was diagnosed with cancer and she was denied medical insurance which forced his father to abandon his retirement and return to work. The principle of affordable healthcare for all has been an objective that has influenced his life work. He also has struggled with weight and throughout the book he likens information consumption to food consumption. Thus, Johnson's book is an essay filled with facts and advice, but it is also a very personal story.

There are several key points that Johnson repeats throughout the short book. First, he contends that big media has moved away from providing information to providing affirmation. News sites and search engines look at what you have clicked on and send you similar information. In doing so, they are essentially confirming your choice. The danger of this is that it narrows your view of the world, essentially putting you into an information bubble. He recommends including among your friends and cohorts people who have different points of view and that you obtain information from the source whenever possible.

He also talks about the loss of social breadth. Social anthropologist Robin Dunbar believes that most people can manage around 150 relationships. Johnson writes "If Dunbar is right, that means our ability to manage news from friends in new social networks, and to enhance meaningful relationships, is limited. By succumbing to our biases and falling into homogeneous groups or epistemic loops, we eliminate the social inputs that bring us news that we we disagree with.....The overconsumption of specialized knowledge .... can make it so that the only thing you are capable of having a conversation about is the thing that you've been so deeply into....if you are not deliberate and careful, your social group too becomes a reflection of that homogenization."

Johnson gives specific advice about how to combat the overconsumption and homogenization of information. Most of these tools are referenced on his website on this page: http://resources.informationdiet.com/...
He also recommends a plan for developing a plan for managing your information consumption with the goal of limiting distractions and devoting more time to what really matters. Johnson concludes with a list of people worth following and additional books to read.

This short book is a good choice for informational professionals and for those who struggle with digital addictions. Now, its time to disconnect and go for a walk on this glorious day!

[nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A call to action for better information habits combined with a recommended information diet.

Moderation, moderation, moderation -- the key to everything, it seems, yet so easy to forget when you have to check your tweets and Facebook and Pinterest and have three (or four) digit numbers in your RSS unread folder only to loop through it again and again, in between personal e-mails and work e-mails and television shows between Netflix movies.
Johnson's political perspective provided an interesting focal point, as did his comparison between information and nutritional behaviors provide a unique lens. I can binge on the Internet just like eating Tostitos -- mindlessly. As a librarian, I know better, but this book was a reminder that just because we have access to information doesn't mean we shouldn't be conscious of how we consume it.

I liked the emphasis on a four-prong process: search, process, filter and share. It is the backbone of the curriculum I one day dream of providing to a school library, although this book made me wish that instruction was to undergrads rather than middle schoolers. I also enjoyed developers being called out as the best minds of our generations, using immediate problem solutions on a small-scale as opportunity for larger change and growth. (Additional points for not using "change agent", a phrase I loathe).

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm giving it two stars just because there is a section on content farms that is interesting. Otherwise, a book badly in need of editing. Sections were obviously taken from blog posts and meshed together, badly. The author's main metaphor: our relationship with information is like our relationship with food. So, just like how we eat empty processed calories, we consume information that already affirms what we believe, and/or from content farms that are mostly interested in selling advertisements, etc. He stretches that metaphor to the breaking point though, and it didn't really work for me. I also disagree with his stance on poo-pooing secondary sources - there is a place for these resources, and his negating these makes me think that he has a limited understanding of the breadth and diversity of information resources.

If I read this as various blog posts over time I would have appreciated it more. Some of the single sections are interesting and stand on their own.

[Katie Nolan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I watched "Better Activism" livestream organized by Clay Johnson the other day and found him very intelligent and thoughtful. So despite my reservations regarding the moralistic sound of the title, I decided to at least read the Kindle sample.

Full disclosure - I have read only the sample, and I will not be reading more. I think his core idea - that more information is not necessarily better information, and that we should be conscious of the information we consume - is sound, but the metaphor he uses to get that point across is so flawed and misinformed that I cannot take him seriously.

He says: "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."

In order for this analogy to work, so-called "good foods" like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, would have to be as cheap for the consumer as the so-called "bad foods." But that's not the case. Whole grains, really fresh fruit and vegetables, all these "good foods" are expensive, and they take time to cook. For people living paycheck to paycheck, or unemployment check to unemployment check in this economy, the choice isn't between "I could buy this apple, or I could buy this Hershey bar. Hershey bar wins because it has more sugar!" The choice is between "I could buy this one apple, or I can buy four Hershey bars. An apple will get me through lunch, but the Hershey bars will get me through the entire day." Even this is is assuming that you have access to these foods. Many people in America live in food deserts, where the /only/ food they have access to is "junk food."

The parallel could still work, if he was talking about systemic issues regarding information. For example, a great deal of scholarly research is kept behind extremely expensive paywalls, that only universities and maybe professional academics can afford. Average citizens are forced to rely on second-third-fourth-fifth hand analysis because they cannot afford to access these sites. Someone who has tv but can't afford the internet has a very limited number of choices in the information they consume - the information equivalent of food deserts.

But this isn't a cultural analysis; it's a self-help book. Mr. Johnson is writing for individuals with means, people whose problem isn't access to reliable sources but simply too many sources. This is a good thing - I firmly agree with him that a well-informed public is critical to democracy, and that being well-informed means, in part, knowing how to judge your sources. If this were packaged like a "How to Organize Your Home!" or "Get Your Desk Under Control in a Weekened!" book, I would be all over it.

But he draws a false equivalence between a personal issue with systemic consequences (information management) and a systemic issue with personal consequences (food & obesity). He plays into the "moral foods" myth and the idea that certain foods are addictive. These are misconceptions that do active harm in our culture, promoting discrimination against fat people, the poor, and to a certain extent, the erasure of poverty. ("How can that person be poor if they can afford enough food to get that fat?")

I don't attribute any nefarious intention to him - he is an expert in politics, not nutrition, and he's been swimming about in the same culture that we all have. But when you're selling a book about being informed, you shouldn't be using misinformation to sell it.

[Bibek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this book during a period of personal reflection. I’d been finding myself using social media, Reddit, and my phone more than usual and craved reclaiming that time for more deep-focus-type pursuits like reading, something I’ve always loved but have fallen off a bit with lately. I was surprised at how little we culturally discuss the makeup of what we put into our minds while there’s such a loud cultural conversation around what we put into our stomachs.

This book does a good job in its first half of laying out the problem at hand. Food diets and information diets have lots of parallels. What we consume shapes us more than we realize. What we consume is usually exactly what we want at a primal level and what we want is exactly what the corporations, marketers, and pundits sell us. But what we want isn’t what’s good for us. What’s good for us is actually pretty complicated. In both the case of food and info, the key is usually diversity and consuming close to the bottom of the trophic pyramid (plants and primary sources).

There are also some really important differences. The biggest one is that food can be regulated by the government while information, at risk of violating the 1st Amendment—and democratic principles more generally, cannot.

The second half of the book gets into the “ok what do I do about it” bits but felt weaker. It delves into prescriptive productivity hacks that feels too nitty-gritty and distracting from the broader points. Johnson leaves us with a general suggestion to “Worry about consuming consciously, and making information — and our information providers — work for you, rather than the other way around.” which feels like a pretty good takeaway but most of the answers around what that looks like are alluded to as being available on [informationdiet.com](http://informationdiet.com), a now-broken website. Somewhat forgivable given the book is a teenager now but less so because the problem it’s about is just as big as ever.

Something that also left a bad taste in my mouth: Johnson suggests that individuals need to take the initiative to consume mostly primary sources (one suggestion he gives is government-provided datasets like that you’d see from Googling “San Francisco data catalog”). This is a great idea for folks that want to take on side projects or careers around journalism but it doesn’t really acknowledge how unrealistic it is to expect every citizen to not just work with myriad complex datasets but to draw meaningful insights from them. Journalism is a useful but injured specialization of labor and Johnson’s recommendations could have better explored how we can heal it. Perhaps the everyday citizen wasn’t the intended audience for that though?

[Jeannie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book, I felt like it was a good essay that had become a slightly bloated book HOWEVER that doesn't change the fact that it makes some excellent and thought provoking points AND offers some useful strategies for dealing with the problem.
I find the basic message about being conscious of what information one consumes and ensuring that it doesn't simply confirm one's existing biases, critically important.
Chapter 3, 'Big Info', was especially interesting to me. The author describes the commercialisation of information in detail, explaining how some of the bigger "affirmation distributors" have a business model that assumes 'industrial' content creation - i.e. that each 'journalist' will produce one post per hour, resulting in "manufactured ignorance" in the consumer. He argues the producer doesn't so much have a political agenda as simply wants to trigger more clicks, which mean more advertising revenue and profit.
Key strategies recommended by the author include preferencing local and raw data and shunning factory farmed information.
I also applaud the mention of "giving your mind a chance to digest the things that you’ve read" (implying limitation of consumption) and "constantly looking to find data and people that challenge your biases".
I also liked the author's suggestion that "the production of information sharpens the mind and clarifies your thought" - I have always been a fan of taking notes and then synthesising them for my own benefit. (Or is this just confirmation of an existing bias of mine?!?)
Also liked how the author highlighted the social consequences of mis-information and that persuasion is a form of social power.
Overall the call to limit our passive exposure to information that is in reality only entertainment and affirmation of our existing biases is really important - and justifies whatever failings the book may have.

[Erik Lovicsek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The parallels drawn between physical obesity and information obesity were quite intriguing and relevant, but much of the rest of the book was showing its age (published in 2012) and wandered off topic at times. It would be interesting to have a refreshed version for 2025, given how the information landscape has changed within the last 13 years, e.g. increasing adoption of social media and the advent of AI. Nevertheless I think the concept of an information diet is brilliant; this is my new year's resolution in order to free up time and energy for activities that will serve me better!

[Caio Turbiani · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a necessary book. The beginning and the middle are very insightful. The book talks more about news, but the same principles can be applied to how we consume entertainment on social media. The last third is a bit boring. It's more focused on the United States and its congress. I guess it's more useful and interesting if you live there.

[rkosurvivor · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Consume deliberately, take information over affirmation"

Pretty much sums up the book well. Give it a read if you want but basically, if your gonna watch what you consume with your mouth, do the same with your eyes.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised I was already following a version of this diet...

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review
By Nicole Boyer

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

The Information Diet is a book that correlates “obesity” with having a balance of over consumption of information and how to distinguish and maintain a balance. This book is gearing towards an audience that has the ability to identify an issue and is willing to adapt and make changes easily in order to be effective. It provides great insight on how to make small goals to achieve a well balance “information diet”

The author identified how we as a society are “obese” in the sense of over consumption. Whether, it be food, politics, social media, electronics. He shows how people are obsessed with food as it correlates how we are overly consumed by the media, social media, and electronics. We makes real life points and shows how we can improve in our daily lives.

Clay Johnson provided his political background mixed into the concept of the “information diet’. He made valid points to have reliable and credible sources when devouring information. Showed how to create a balance for an information overload and not overindulge in article after article. Create a balance and a formula to your day to eliminate the information overload so you don’t crash. This is vital to your overall health as obesity plays a part in our lives. Be transparent about the information you are sharing with others, and show how you can make a difference on your overall information diet. Choose not to be one of those people who follows and feeds the negativity. Go out and join your community on the information and issues you want to improve as a whole. As the author mentions, how easy it is to get consumed in our email, phones, and social media everyday and how much time it can take away from our daily lives, we are truly wasting our time on overloading ourselves in information overload and lose sight of our work and having a balance in our lives. All of his points all go back to obesity and how we need to maintain a well balance meal, just as much as we need a well balanced information diet. Don’t get caught up in the “fake news” and seek information that is factual and that will help you towards your future.


I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It captured my interest from the start because it brought up so many reliable points that anyone could relate to. That is hard to find in books these days. I would say that I felt some of his points kept getting repetitive but also feel that was the authors way of getting the point across to the readers. Clay Johnson was able to capture my attention from the first page and is rare for me. I would recommend his book to anyone that wants an honest opinion about how we use our time and what we can do to make healthier choices moving forward. It was a very eye opening book.

[Carie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is worth reading. I appreciated that it was short, which is rare in nonfiction.

The premise of the book is basically this: "Consume deliberately. Take information over affirmation."

You may not agree with this author on every point. He is after all, a liberal democrat. Gasp! (I like that he openly admits his biases.) I especially enjoyed his personal stories. His "delusion" while working on the Dean campaign (his word, not mine.) His surprise friendship with Carl Rove, who for most liberals is the devil incarnate. His story about the Thanksgiving argument with his conservative uncle.

These points resonated with me: 1. Most of us want information that confirms our beliefs (affirmation) instead of information that is true. 2. Most "news" is actually profit driven entertainment. 3. We should stay away from churned "news" (most of the stuff on yahoo, aol, and other internet sites.) 4. We should seek the least "processed" information. 5. We should also seek information from sources that we don't agree with.

I made some personal changes after reading this book. Most were not directly addressed in this book, things like spending less time on the computer/being more purposeful about my computer time. Checking my email via Mail and thus avoiding the churned yahoo "news." I also have a greater desire to read local news.

Here are some direct quotes from the book, in case you are short on time and don't want to read the entire thing.

-The (news) companies are all publicly traded corporations - ones with responsibilities to their shareholders to do their best to maximize profits.

-In efforts to cut costs, journalists often become more filters than reporters, succumbing to the torrents of spin heading their way, and passing on what's said by the scores of PR consultants. Rather than report the news, they simply copy what's in a press release and paste it into their stories.

-Confirmation bias makes us seeks out information that we agree with. But it's also the case that once we're entrenched in a belief, the facts will not change our minds.

-We have to think of our "attention" as a currency - and it's about time we started guarding it, consciously.

-A healthy information diet means the avoidance of over processed information.

-Be honest with yourself about what your biases are.

-Seek of diverse topics of information - information from different fields helps us create better ideas.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch what you put in your mind, just as you watch what you put in your mouth. Be deliberate, lest you waste your life and accidentally become stupid. Look to modern thinking on food to guide how you consume information. That's Clay's thesis in a nutshell, and most of the book is a component-by-component elaboration on the food=information metaphor, culminating in Clay's advice on how to be a discriminating thoughtful and measured information consumer. He says things I agree with, yet I have reservations about the book. Why?

The book is basically high concept. Just like Hollywood pitches ("it's Godzilla meets Goonies in space!") or Silicon Valley elevator pitches ("it's mobile Skype for dog dating!"), once you've heard "treat information like food", the rest of the book writes itself. The bulk of the book explains the status quo piece by piece (what content farms are, financial incentives for Fox News to be partisan, etc.) and the recommendations don't seem controversial (seek sources of information rather than reprocessors, learn to interpret data yourself). Just like a Hollywood movie written from a concept is generally cobbled together from convenient stereotypes and predictable situations, sometimes "The Information Diet" felt like it was a collection of common-sense advice assembled around the food=information gimmick.

That said, I live in the information ecology and have had to arrive at many of Clay's suggestions as a survival mechanism. One of my daily activities is finding Four Short Links for radar.oreilly.com, which generally involves reading a vast number of blog posts and tweets to find four relevant things. When I reclaimed my life from this last year, I placed deliberate boundaries and limits on what I consumed and when. Similarly, I try to maintain a pulse of different thought in my life: I read from far right as well as far left, but never much of either--I find that both drive me crazy in anything but low doses :)

So this book is best suited for the person consuming an unhealthy balance of information, preferably one who can realize the error of their ways. For such a person, "The Information Diet" will lay out what's healthy, what's unhealthy, and how to achieve balance and control over one's inputs. The trick is to get it into their hands ...

[Bill Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book is an eye-opening explanation of how the algorithms of the internet are creating the kind of disunited uncivil discourse and even false beliefs that lead to the January 6th incursion. A must read to learn why we must change out info consumption and internet habits, especially social media. The second half of the book provides suggested technical solutions, OK, but not great.

[Stringy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick, thought-provoking read that left me wanting more. But as Johnson points out, we're dealing with a new phenomenon so the ways forward from here haven't all been discovered yet.

We often speak about 'information overload', but since the invention of the printing press hundreds of years ago there has always been more information available than one person could consume in a lifetime. Johnson suggests that 'information obesity' is a better metaphor for what we face today: junk factoids pushed onto us by marketers and PR reps in the disguise of news and current events. Or, to use the old communications phrase, the noise is drowning out the signal.

He discusses what he feels are the negative consequences of getting too much affirmation instead of information, with nearly all of his examples coming from the American political sphere. As an Aussie, I was vaguely familiar with those examples, and was able to compare them to similiar issues I see everyday here.

Carrying on with the metaphor, Johnson believes that transparency in government/business is about as good as the nutrition panels on processed food (i.e. only useful if you already care), and that information fasts (regular time spent away from the media/internet) are the anorexia of the info world. He suggests a diet instead, which focuses on less processed information of better quality than the junk-news we often get. He has suggestions for how to do this, and welcomes more ideas from his readers.

Finally, he asks any developers reading the book to pair up with a journalist and see if they can come up with ideas for improving the state of our information flows. He's got experience with activist development, and feels that there's a lot more work to be done in the area.

I already use an ad-blocker and avoid TV news. I'm thinking of cutting back my RSS feeds to only include the useful sources and original thinkers instead of the lifestyle and tech aggregators I often flip past quickly. I can always visit their sites if I'm in the mood for entertainment rather than information.

[David Park · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I began rationing (and rationalizing) my internet usage because I was spending too much time on the Internet I realized this was fundamentally about how I process information - email, Facebook, and link hopping.

CAJ says to treat your information like food. In Part One he makes the argument of comparing information to food and why we enjoy consuming so much of both. My favorite part was that consuming the same 'junk' information will strengthen our 'reality dysmorphia,' a cognitive version of 'body dysmorphia.' He makes the case on why there is junk information in the first place (AOL Way, Big Tobacco), and how too much information can lead to very real physical side effects - being sedentary, email apnea (really - we breath more shallow when checking our email), loss of focus from notifications (increased heart rate after reading a text message), and a poor sense of time.

Part two is on how to have a healthy information diet - having data literacy (CAJ suggests data literacy in the future will be like knowing how to read a 100 years ago), a sense of humor, and a method of training to improve our executive functioning. There are many good quid bits here: 'Respect good content, disrespect advertisements,' 'Avoid over processed information,' and 'balance means keeping our desire for affirmation in check.'

[Mike Vardy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether you spend time online or offline, we are getting hit with a ton of information each and every day. How we deal with that information is fundamental to our lives; what we choose take in can strongly impact our way we see the world. Johnson’s book is a meaty read, and might be tough to digest for some people. But it’s a healthy one as well.

I can’t think of many books that are more important to check out, no matter the time of year. While a nutritional lifestyle change is often fodder for many resolutions as we kick off a new year, taking a look at the amount and type of information we’re letting into our minds is just as crucial.

Feast on this book. It has the ability to change your life on so many levels for the better. Give your mind a cleanse and grab a copy of The Information Diet. It’s a filling – and fulfilling – reading experience.

[Max Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was basically a regurgitation of The Filter Bubble and The Shallows, both of which were superior books. While there were some good sources for information, the primary message was not so much one of how to deal with information overload (or information obesity as the author calls it) as one of how to be better informed so you can be a better citizen and be more involved in politics. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's not why I picked this book. Overall, the book was scattered, as if the author couldn't quite decide what exactly his point was, which is ironic, considering the subject matter.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book helped me realize that I'm a dopamine fiend. That is, my getting stuck in those facebook-gmail-text loops is me waiting for another notification, which feels good to get. The author suggests setting aside certain times of day to check email, which I should really do. The author did bring in his own political opinions, which I didn't care to know, but the rest the book is concise enough.

[Diego Petrucci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un'ottima idea di fondo, realizzazione mediocre. A volte dati i capitoli molto brevi pare di leggere una cosa poco strutturata e più "flusso di pensieri".

[Christie Martel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. As an information professional I can completely understand his argument/philosophy.
And, come on, he quotes Michael Pollan... How can you not like that?

[Romany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've come across these ideas elsewhere, but this was a very readable way in which to consume them.

[David Sasaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

One never says that a lung cancer victim dies of “cigarette overload” ... Why, then, do we blame the information for our ills?

Clay Johnson is the latest of his class to take a few steps back and ask himself, "wait a minute, why wan't I able to revolutionize the world in just ten years thanks to my mastery of the Internet?"

From 2000 - 2007 we suffered from a scarcity of access to knowledge and information. In 2004 veteran business journalist Dan Gillmor published We the Media to celebrate a new phenomenon, "Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People." In 2006 Jay Rosen coined and honored "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Also in 2006 the Sunlight Foundation was established with the idea that if more information was published about how government works, politicians would be held accountable. A year earlier we created Global Voices to amplify the voices of independent bloggers in regions historically under-represented by "the mainstream media" (a term that, at the time, had actual meaning).

Now Dan Gillmor is less concerned with all those well-intentioned, independent voices and more focused on how to filter them out. (Unfortunately, no one seems to have time to read his book, or any other for that matter, so he is practically giving it away at $1.) Jay Rosen, meanwhile, is wondering what went wrong with his vision for "pro-am journalism." Global Voices continues to be a jewel of fascinating content (where else will you find a collection of Arab bloggers' homages to Whitney Houston?), but these days you're more likely to hear co-founder Ethan Zuckerman complain about "imaginary cosmopolitanism." And Clay Johnson, formerly the director of Sunlight Labs, left his gig promoting transparency to reflect a bit on how much of it we really need, and why?

The result is his first book, The Information Diet , and the movement he hopes it will spawn. I like that Clay and others are now focusing on media literacy; that is, the demand for, and not just the supply of, information. Meaningful data depends on our ability to make meaning from it. Clay uses the helpful metaphor of nutrition to explain how to most effectively manage our transition from scarcity to abundance of information:

If unhealthy information consumption creates bad information habits the way unhealthy eating creates food addictions, then what good is transparency? 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.

This is obviously a direct challenge to our work at Omidyar Network. So far we have invested heavily in civic startups that "flood the market with broccoli," but we have done relatively little to promote better info-nutrition. (I would argue that this is the principle reason for an education system, though it doesn't seem to be preparing students very well for the modern information ecology.)

I was slightly disappointed by the shallow treatment of the neuropsychology of information consumption. (For that we may need to turn to Torkel Klingberg's Overflowing Brain .) Clay does his best to offer a literature review of popular blog posts treating the subject, but the reader perceives that perhaps he was distracted himself when reading into the details of the research. Still, we're offered basic though useful observations like:

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.

Just like we're hardwired to enjoy salt, fat, and sugar, we also have a natural bias toward fear, violence, sex and gossip. While those interests helped us survive when we were organized in tribes, today they limit our ability to become active, engaged citizens. Also, just as some individuals are genetically predisposed to obesity, some of us also seem to be genetically predisposed to info-obesity. I know that I am. If I have to stand in a line for longer than two minutes, I simply can't resist pulling out my telephone to check email, check twitter, check anything at all in my brain's subconscious search for small hits of dopamine . What's being said? What is being said about me? What can I say? It is an unnecessary and unhealthy compulsion.

The book also cites some interesting studies about the physiological consequences of constant info-consumption. Linda Stone, for example, found that 80% of the subjects she studied hold their breath when an email arrives to their inbox. (I began noticing that I also frequently hold my breath when concentrating on incoming content on my screen.)

Clay offers the reader more than mere analysis and outcry; he also proposes a useful guide to info-nutrition (noting with sobriety that neither the infinitude of nutrition books nor the mandatory nutritional labels have managed to lower physical obesity rates). Paraphrasing:

* Read local. More news about your local neighborhood, less national and international news that you can't put to use.
* Improve your data literacy; understand the basics of statistics
* Be mindful. Consume information only when you have the attention to make sense of it.
* Enjoy. Consuming information can be both healthy and enjoyable. It shouldn't feel like a chore.
* Read closer to the source; that is, more raw data about how your government and society work; less punditry.
* Become a specialist in a few topics, but use platforms like Khan Academy, iTunes U, TED, and Kickstarter to become a generalist in others.

For the geeks among us, he also recommends a list of helpful tools and default settings to become more savvy info consumers. In fact, if you're already convinced that you suffer from information obesity, you can probably skip the book and head straight to this section. I think it's a great curation — much more useful than the tool dump at Mediactive. I published my own info-consumption workflow a year and a half ago in response to Becky's inquiry. My tools and tactics have since changed and are more in line with those of P. Kerim Friedman, but it's something we all have to figure out on our own.

All in all, I am a big fan of Clay's book and I've recommended it to my many friends and colleagues who, like me, suffer from info obesity. But I can't help but point out a few ironies:

Clay reminds us that "attention is the currency that marketers lust for, and it’s about time we started guarding it, consciously, like we guard our bank accounts." Yet his Twitter account has mostly turned into a stream of marketing for his book.

Speaking of marketing, the front page of InformationDiet.com includes statements of support from many of those who are most responsible for info-glut: Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, Ev Williams of Twitter, and Baratunde Thurston of The Onion. Famous and talented all, but there is very little evidence that they have become more responsible publishers or consumers of content. Baratunde's latest blog post invites his readers to become his marketers.

Finally, it seems like we are often more interested in discussing the meta of media than consuming media itself. I am under the impression that more people read Ethan's analysis of why we should read more global news than they actually read global news. Which is why, for me, it's time to put down the increasing number of books like Clay's and start focusing more on my local community.