Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness

by Tara Brabazon

Imagine if a student spent as much time managing information as celebrities doted on dieting? While eating too much food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, excessive information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and questioning. Digital From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness probes the social, political and academic difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. But this book does not diagnose a crisis. Instead, Digital Dieting provides strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal. In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher education? If students complain that the reading is ’too hard’, then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage this challenge is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in the long term. Digital From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.

342 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

I am the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University. I have written 22 books, 11 audiobooks, over 350 refereed articles and book chapters, and over 600 research outputs. I have podcasted since 2008 and vlogged since 2016.

Reviews

[Mary Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been a long time fan of Tara Brabazon's Youtube channel where she uploads videos for PhD students so I finally thought I should pick up one of her books. What book to pick?
I just started teaching this year and was noticing something very weird in my undergraduate student's essays. After discussing it with a senior faculty member, I was able to put a name to the problem: my students had a serious problem with information literacy. They could not find information (any way other than Google, and then poorly. Not a single one of my students used a physical book on their research papers), could not evaluate information for accuracy or legitimacy (I got a few travel blogs cited for a research paper...), and couldn't synthesize ideas from multiple sources into coherent arguments. So, I chose one of Brabazon's books that dealt with information literacy.
If the title is giving you pause, as it did me at first: Brabazon is using a food/obesity metaphor to discuss a lack of information literacy in universities. In this metaphor, Google is like a fast food chain: it provides a simple option to answer intellectual "hunger" that is much easier to fall back on than actually taking the time to consider what we are imbibing (in this case, mentally.) When students fall back on Google, it's because they haven't developed the skillset to chose, process, and consume higher-quality information. Rather like ordering a Big Mac instead of learning to cook something yourself.
The metaphor works well, but there were times when I had to wonder if my own information illiteracy was getting in the way or if there was something else going on here. I'm 25 years old, on the younger end of millenials, so I am still in the generation that Brabazon is talking about (indeed, I was in my first year of university when this book came out in 2013.) So I'm willing to acknowledge that it might be a fault of my own information literacy, but there were chapters in this book that I thought were brilliant and chapters that I could not connect to the argument as a whole. I have a strictly humanities background here, so maybe I'm not as familiar with the conventions of interdisciplinary social sciences, but the chapter on iPads didn't connect to the rest of the argument for me. Ditto, the sonic media chapter. I assume there is a convention for case-study chapters or something, but I had to struggle to get through them.
I'll confess again here that I had two particular goals in mind for reading this book: identifying the root causes of my student's information literacy and developing some strategies to help them develop those skills. The first one was certainly answered, the second one only half-so, because 1. I have no interest in buying an iPad and 2. I teach Art History, which is image based first and foremost rather than sonically enabled. I guess I'm doomed to Brabazon's nearly-detested Microsoft PowerPoint, but I'll comfort myself that there is little to no writing on those slides. Just pictures, as God intended.

But that's just two chapters and I do think that the rest of the book is excellent. It might not be of interest to her, but I wish Brabazon would write a book for PhD students that is equal parts informative/well-researched and practical/how-to. I would absolutely devour it.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book in Brabazon's 'Digital Hemlock' trilogy — perhaps due to it being the most recent. Having gone through the different stages of the academic student career (BA, MA, PhD student) in the last ten years, it captures many of the 'symptoms' that were present at the halfway mark. Some of the media discussed have (inevitably) become obsolete, but the core issues discussed still touch upon important issues related to my experiences with higher education.
Having read this book did not radically alter my thoughts about a future teaching career, but it did provide some useful insights in issues that can come up with students and how to overcome them. The key message of the book that we should be striving to increase literacy skills (depth, quality) rather than focus on 'more of the same' (aimless width, quantity just for quantity) is an important idea that made me positively evaluate most of my lecture experiences (luckily, pphfwww) and inspire me to pursue a similar course when I am up there on stage.
Thanks,

from T. to T.

[Aaron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hard to know where to begin with this one... the title is a good indication of the myopically individualist victim-blaming non-solutions you'll find inside. Brabazon has actually stumbled a$$ backward into something though. The clumsy title works. Diets do not work. They won't help you lose weight, and they won't help you learn to learn in the 21st century.

A truly wild misdiagnosis of the forces impoverishing higher education. Especially considering the use of the term "de-skilling." Hope this analysis is resigned to the trash heap of history, but I am very sure it won't be.

[Nina Chachu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very illuminating regarding the state of tertiary education and information literacy - or lack thereof - among students in the early 21st century. Author feels that students do need to work more and be challenged more.