The Information Diet Read online

  The third is Kickstarter, which has effectively replaced the “Arts & Leisure” section of my local newspaper. Kickstarter’s purpose is to fund small projects and help artists and entrepreneurs get off the ground, but it turns out that it’s grown to be a good source of inspiration and entertainment as well.

  Kickstarter lets you see what some people (the self-selecting group that uses the service) are passionate about—whether it’s building the world’s largest database, performing analysis of hip-hop music, or writing a guidebook to breakfast joints in Columbus, Ohio. It lets you browse local projects, too, so you can see what kinds of things are starting up in your town—and if you feel inclined, you can support local artists.

  Again, the point isn’t to visit these three sites as an endorsement of ideas, or a strict rule for your information diet. But in the frame of conscious consumption, they mean something different. You’re choosing to consciously visit these sites on a regular basis in order to get something particular out of them: diversity.

  Think of it like going out to a different kind of restaurant than the usual places you go. There’s nothing wrong with eating at the same place every day, but sometimes you need to branch out and see what else is out there.

  Balance

  So just how much of what should you consume? Every diet book in the world has some kind of recommendation—an interesting way of telling you what it is you should eat, and what it is you shouldn’t. I’m afraid that in the world of information, our tastes are far more diverse and require far more specialization than our food diets, and thus, I can’t make a recommendation for everybody.

  There’s also information I’ve left out—information that I’ll make no attempt to classify or prescribe a diet for. For instance, our varying religious beliefs have prescriptions for consumption that are inappropriate to contradict.

  Our information diets are also tied to our professions. Nobody but models and personal trainers get fired for eating too much fried chicken, or promoted for eating too much celery. But our information diets have serious job consequences: a doctor not dedicating enough of her time to skill development could lose her ability to practice.

  Because our jobs and belief systems are very different, and because professions and religions often come with their own basic information diets baked in, a universal prescription for an information diet is impossible. But the good habits I’ve described in this chapter are possible.

  The information diet I maintain looks like Figure 10-4.

  Figure 10-4. The information diet maintained by the author.

  The categories I’ve chosen here reflect the various suggestions I have in this chapter, but your breakdown will look different than mine. The situations of your work, and your stage in life, may require a vastly different diet than the one I’m on. And the truth is, the averages I’ve suggested are averages: they vary from day to day. Pollan’s “Eat. Not too much. Mostly plants.” beats the food pyramid not only with its simplicity but also its flexibility.

  The classification and categorization of information are always subjective, and sometimes controversial. Do not worry nearly as much about achieving some set standard of balance, or even emulating my diet. Worry about consuming consciously, and making information—and our information providers—work for you, rather than the other way around. Form healthy habits, and the right balance will follow from it.

  Balance means keeping our desire for affirmation in check. For the amount of time I spend consuming things that I believe in, I try to spend twice as much time seeking information from sources that disagree with me. The end result is twofold: not only do I gain exposure to differing viewpoints, but I also limit my passive exposure to mass affirmation.

  Support and Fine Tuning

  Going on an information diet is as difficult as going on a food diet. For a lot of us, it requires the support and ideas of our family and community. And it’s personal, too—our minds, just like our food palates, have different and unique tastes. Building a healthy information diet means discovering what works best for you, and creating a routine that you can stick to.

  I built InformationDiet.com with this in mind. Reading this book is just the beginning of what is hopefully a larger journey towards better health, and as more people make more discoveries about what works for them, we can start sharing with one another what works and what doesn’t.

  If you’re looking for ideas about what kinds of information could possibly share in your information production regime (I recommend at least an hour a day dedicated to writing or otherwise publishing information), try publishing what your information diet is, and how it’s working for you. Publish it on the InformationDiet.com forums, or publish it on your own website and drop me a line on Twitter (@cjoh), and I’ll be happy to link to it from InformationDiet.com.

  Part III. Social Obesity

  “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

  —Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Yancey 1816[86]

  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 sparking revolutions, but isn’t particularly useful when trying to create civilized discourse. Use Meetup.com to find or host regular InfoDiet meetups in your area. Share them with me, too, on InformationDiet.com and via Twitter. I’ll make sure people know they’re happening, and I’ll try to attend as many as I can.

  Learn. There’s more to this subject than the concepts in this book. If you’re looking for things to discuss in your local group, check out some of the great reports that the Knight Commission puts out on the future of information and the media, or read some of the many documents in the further reading and bibliography sections of this book. You can also tune in to the blog on InformationDiet.com as more is discovered in the worlds of neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

  Act. The group isn’t meaningful unless it causes outcomes useful to its local community. To improve digital literacy in your community, start with kids. Find and fund nonprofits that help to teach these skills to children in local schools or in after-school programs. To get information from the bottom of the trophic pyramid of information, start advocating for your local government organizations (your county and city) to create online data catalogs and make public the data that you’re already paying for. The same goes for the media: start demanding that they offer source material rather than provide you with their analysis and perspective.

  It’s also important to share what you’ve learned and how you’re causing change in your community, to help others that are starting groups in their local communities learn best practices. InformationDiet.com has lots of resources to help you, including a discussion board that you can use to connect with other groups across the globe.

  The remainder of this book is a call to action for the vast rational conspiracy—ideas and observations that come from my time here in Washington, and my time working with and interviewing civic leaders across the country. It’s the empowered information diet: once you lose the fluff and start really seeing what’s going on, new priorities arise that require new tactics to accomplish.

  Chapter 11. The Participation Gap

  “The great lie politicians like me tell people like you is ‘vote for me and I’ll solve all your problems.’ The truth is, you have the power.”

  —Governor Howard Dean [88]

  The Scalability Problem

  The first cause of the participation gap is a problem that technologists would call scale. The underlying structures of government aren’t designed to handle our present population as it is currently interacting with government.

  If you take a look at the Constitution, you’ll quickly figure out that the framers couldn’t have imagined a union with this many people in it. At our first census, the population of the United States was at less than 10 million people scattered across the 13 colonies that now make up the eastern seaboard. The population of Planet Earth was a measly one billion people. There is no way that the framers could have conceived of a country of 300 million people—roughly a third of the world’s population at that time.

  But the framers did something smart: they pegged the number of representatives in the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, to be proportional to population. Our first Congress, in 1789, had 65 members of the House of Representatives for roughly four million people; each member represented approximately 60,000 people.

  In 1890, our population had grown, and so did our House of Representatives. Each of the 325 members of the House represented roughly 200,000 people. Then at the turn of the last century, just before our population exploded, Congress came to the realization that the House of Representatives was getting unruly and incapable of getting anything done, so they put a cap on the number of total representatives that we have: 435.

  The result today is a staggering 1:717,000 ratio. The only democratic country in the world with a ratio more unwieldy than ours is India. If you combined the populations of Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK, and had them all represented by just the number of members of UK’s House of Commons, they’d still have a lower ratio than we have in the United States.

  It’s impossible for one person to accurately represent 717,000 people—it’s why candidates have to raise and spend millions of dollars on television advertisements rather than getting to know their constituents. It’s why members of Congress have to rely on lobbyists to get ideas on what to do, and it’s why the media sensationalizes politics. Today, politicians must come out strong on polarizing issues in order to get the attention of the major media markets they’re representing. Thus, it’s easier for people to treat Republicans and Democrats like the Red Sox and the Yankees.

  Granted, a lot has changed since that 1:60,000 ratio was created: we have gone through the media revolutions of the telegraph, the radio, the television, and the Internet, all of which should positively affect a member’s ability to hear from her constituents.

  We also have enhanced travel technology and infrastructure: planes, trains, and automobiles, combined with a strong civic infrastructure of roads, highways, train tracks, and airports, make it easier for a member to travel back and forth to hear from her district. But even with this new technology, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a scalability problem with our democracy.

  So how do we solve this problem? The law placing a cap on members of Congress was invented 100 years ago for a good reason: Congress was getting unwieldy. If we reverted to our framers’ 1:60,000 ratio, we’d now have over 5,000 members of Congress. It’s unlikely they would be able to work as a cohesive legislative body at that level.

  Sticking to that ratio would mean rebuilding the Capitol building into something that looked a bit more like RFK Stadium—congresses would look more like trade shows than what we see today—and it would mean a Congress that couldn’t effectively get anything done.

  It would also be impos
sible to make happen. Getting two-thirds of Congress to agree to dilute their power to less than 1/200th what it is today seems highly unlikely, and the other way to do it—getting two-thirds of the states to hold a constitutional convention on the issue—seems equally implausible.

  Transparency

  Transparency’s Dark Side

  There is a dark side of transparency. Today, it’s a tool used as much by the corrupt and dishonest as it is by those who are actually honest. It’s used as an illusion to give the appearance of honesty without the intent of being honest. You can simply claim to be transparent, and create a halo of honesty about you, without actually being honest.

  Two factors empower this dark side of transparency. We’ve discussed them a lot in this book. The first is our deluge of information and facts disguised as entertainment. Even the most open and transparent systems must compete with buckets of information that are more interesting. The second is our poor information diets—that we choose information we want to hear over information that reveals the truth makes the competition all the more difficult.

  Whether it is the press, the government, or businesses, without conscious and deliberate consumption, transparency does more harm than good. While it can be used as a means of disinfecting a system, transparency can also be used by the corrupt to create a false association with integrity and honesty. A member of Congress could become a public paragon of honesty and integrity by live-streaming video from his congressional office, yet privately be a crook by selling out America in the coffee shop across the street. When he’s caught, he could say, “How dare you question my integrity! I have cameras in my office,” and make the prosecution all the more difficult.