Why Your Information Diet Is Probably Terrible

[Rene Abad]

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rene




http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/eating-dessert-information-diet-terrible/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=2012-10-01



Eating Only Dessert: Why Your Information Diet Is Probably Terrible [Feature]
September 28, 2012 By Justin Pot

“How many people here know what the resolution is on the new Macbook Pro?”

Clay Johnson asked that question earlier this year while speaking to a
class in Washington, DC. Eighty percent of the class knew the answer
(it’s 2880×1800).

Johnson asked another question. “What is the child poverty rate here in DC?”

Not one student knew the answer (29.1 percent).

“What’s more relevant if you have $2000 to spend?” he asks me. “Your
laptop works fine. I don’t want to lay a guilt trip on you, but
somebody should know, out of a class of fifty people – one person
should know that the child poverty rate is 29 percent.”

I’m talking with Johnson over Skype; he’s in DC, I’m in Boulder,
Colorado. I have to admit: I don’t know the child poverty rate in
Boulder (17.5 percent).

The point, Johnson explains, is knowing the poverty rate in your city
can help you be a better citizen and possibly help you build a better
community. Knowing the resolution of a just-released laptop cannot.

But the average person is more likely to read about the new MacBook’s
resolution than the poverty rate where they live.

“Is it that newsworthy that a laptop was released?” he asks me.
“Because that’s apparently that’s what’s newsworthy today”.
‘Going Straight To Dessert, Every Time’

Technology journalism today is written by people who don’t
understand technology, and it basically amounts to advertisements for
Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

Johnson is the author of The Information Diet, a book with a unique
core metaphor: heavily processed information, like heavily processed
food, isn’t healthy but for some reason we can’t get enough of it.

Email. Social networks. Blogs. Online video. People today consume more
information than ever before, and typically only consume the things
they really, really like. Johnson compares this to a bad diet.

“If you only ate what you want then we’d probably put the dessert
section at the top of the menu, rather than at the bottom,” he says.
“I think the same thing is happening with journalism: we’re going
straight to dessert every time.”

Tech-savvy people are no exception.

“Technologists aren’t picking up a newspaper: they’re going to Hacker
News or Reddit or Tech Meme and reading stuff that really doesn’t
matter to them,” he says. “Technology journalism today is written by
people who don’t understand technology, and it basically amounts to
advertisements for Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft.”

As a technology journalist I can’t help but reflect on that. I linked
to a MacBook Pro article above, but could hardly find a MakeUseOf
article about child poverty.
72 Trillion Dollars

They need to create cheap, popular information.

Later I bring up a particular incident: various websites reporting the
RIAA demanded $73 trillion dollars from Limewire.

“Isn’t that more money than exists on earth?” he laughs.

“Yeah,” I say, “But news organizations reported it as fact. Why do you
think that is?”

“It probably got people to click,” Johnson says. “That’s how our media
has defined itself now. Our food companies industrialized and created
incentives, so there is now a responsibility to create cheap, popular
calories. Now we’ve industrialized media, and they need to create
cheap, popular information.”

Fact checking isn’t cheap, and statistics aren’t popular. So we get
stories about celebrities, sideboob and new laptops. We only eat
dessert.

Social networking isn’t helping: people tend to share dessert with
their friends online more than vegetables.



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