The Information Diet - A Case for Conscious Consumption
About the Information Diet
Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you 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 in today's information age.
With this book, you’ll learn:
- The relationship between power, authority, and information since the dawn of the first major information-technology boom
- How people react to information consumption, according to cognitive science and neuroscience findings
- How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits
- What constitutes a healthy information diet and how you can get started
Grab Your Copy and Start a Healthier Diet
Interact with the Author
Start an Information Diet Chapter Near You
Clay will be visiting local chapters in select cities on his 2012 book tour.
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Popular Highlight from the Book
- "We know we’re products of the food we eat. Why wouldn’t we also be products of the information we consume?"
- "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."
- "Anthropomorphized computers and information technology cannot take responsibility for anything. The responsibility for healthy consumption lies with human technology, in the software of the mind."
- "As long as good, honest information is out there about what’s what, and people have the means to consume it, the most dangerous conspiracy is the unspoken pact between producer and consumer."
- "There always has been more human knowledge and experience than any one human could absorb. It’s not the total amount of information, but your information habit that is pushing you to whatever extreme you find uncomfortable."
- "Unplugging, internet sabbaticals, social media vacations, and 'email bankruptcies' are all ways to avoid the real problem: our own bad habits. Ask any nutritionist, and they'll tell you that a diet isn't about not eating -- it's about changing your consumption habits."
- "Mass affirmation is the carbohydrate of the mind."
- "Transparency isn’t a replacement for integrity and honesty; it’s an infrastructural tool that allows for those attributes to occur—but only if the public is willing act upon the information that they receive as a result of transparency in a conscious, deliberate way."
- "Information obesity isn’t new. Just as it was possible to be obese 500 years ago, it was possible to experience this new kind of ignorance 500 years ago, too. It was just more expensive, and you had to work much harder for it. But now we’re living in a world of abundance..."
- "The seeds of opinion can be dangerous things. Once we begin to be persuaded of something, we not only seek out confirmation for that thing, but we also refute fact even in the face of incontrovertible evidence."
- "Our media companies aren’t neuroscientists, nor are they conspiratorial. There’s no elaborate plot aimed at driving Americans apart to play against each other in games of reds vs. blues. ... Through the tests of trial and error, the media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop."
