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Book Review: The Information Diet
stoolpigeon writes "It is a well known fact that the United States has an obesity problem. There are numerous causes that ultimately lead to an imbalance in the ratio between the number of calories taken in to the number of calories burned. The size of the American diet industry is another good indicator of how widespread the problem has become. Clay Johnson believes that the issues the U.S. has with food have become mirrored in how we consume information." Read below for the rest of stoolpigeon's review.
The Information Diet
author
Clay A. Johnson
pages
160
publisher
O'Reilly Media
rating
8/10
reviewer
stoolpigeon
ISBN
978-1449304683
summary
A Case for Conscious Consumption
Understanding, and buying into, this metaphor of information obesity is key to The Information Diet. Johnson is aware of this and the text never wanders far from the comparisons. He begins with an extensive telling of the physical obesity issue that plagues the United States and then always frames the rest of his work in nutritional/fitness terms. A few chapters are "Welcome to Information Obesity", "The Symptoms of Information Obesity", "Attentions Fitness" and "How to Consume." Readers who don't buy into the parallels are going to have a really hard time with the book. The comparison and prescriptions for behavior never wander far from the picture and so it's not something one can brush off early on and then ignore for the rest of the book. I think that Johnson is right, so I dug into the book, eager to see what he recommended.
I don't think that anyone would argue about the physical obesity problem. I think what readers may be skeptical about is this idea of information obesity. The premise that Johnson puts forward is that we have access to more information than ever before, much in the same way that developed nations have more food available than ever before. (I will let the reader continue to draw the parallels — this example should be enough to figure it out.) While we have more information than ever before, not all information is equal. Some information is good for us and some is not. Another problem is that we tend to seek certain kinds of information that can give us a skewed and inaccurate view of the world we live in. People have access to more information yet they become more ignorant.
Johnson is an activist. Much of his life has been about affecting change. He is very upfront about this and the book contains a large amount of biographical information. Of course this is because he must. Johnson is laying out an argument for digging past the fluff, the bias and finding ways to be informed by facts. But he has his own built in bias and internal spin that he must counter even as he encourages the reader to do the same. I think that for the most part he has managed to do this well, not necessarily by being completely objective but by being transparent. Some of his examples felt a little weak to me, but this is because I had such a different approach to the event, topic or people that he chose as examples. I think his underlying observations were correct, and his sharing freely about his background and default positions helped me to reconcile his main point with my reservations about the specific examples.
The first six chapters are part of the introduction section and lay out Johnson's case for the information obesity problem. The next four chapters are the actual "Information Diet". Here Johnson moves from describing the problem to full on advocacy. Always striving for objectivity Johnson is always quick to describe what science is out there to give light to his position. The problem is that there just isn't much of it out there. This means that the diet itself is a mix of what has seemed to work well for Johnson himself and some broad recommendations. This may be frustrating to anyone who is looking for hard and fast direction. It's not that Johnson doesn't give concrete suggestions, it's just that he can't claim any assurance that they will work for anyone but himself. That said, I think there is a good chance that many of his ideas about how we spend our time taking in information, how we find sources and tools as well as attitudes that may help seem to be good. I think that anyone who moves from being unaware of the issue to being intentional in how they take in information is better off by that change alone.
Working through this process of finding the "diet" that works for someone is something they may want to do with others. With this in mind, and I think reflecting Johnson's bent as an activist, there is an Information Diet web site with a blog, resources and information on things like events. It is tied into some social tools and so one is able to interact with other information dieters.
Unfortunately this site is at once a marketing tool for the book (hoped 'movement' I guess) and this reflects the constant tension that exists in the fact that Johnson is at once pushing for social change and seeking to profit at the same time. He is constantly in danger, while writing and in the external resources for the book, of violating the principles he is endorsing. A friend recently told me, "David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, which argues against procreation, dedicates this book to his parents." It's that appearance of contradiction that pops up here as well. I'm told to filter out more noise, seek out better information and twitter and if I like the idea here are the buttons to let the world know on Facebook, Twitter, g+ or email. It's not that this can't all be reconciled, it is just jarring. This is something that will drive skeptics nuts and I dinged my rating of the book for it, though I think the good outweighs the bad in this regard. Just because the site exists, I don't think that invalidates the thought and I don't have to go there. I feel I've benefited from the book alone.
The book is squarely aimed at an American audience. That's pretty clear from the get-go. Much of Johnson's life has been involved in American politics, the obesity metaphor works well for an American audience and so it makes sense that this would be the scope of the work. I think that is unfortunate because I believe there is a broader application for his ideas with regard to how information is processed and the explosion in the amount of information available. A person who is not an American could read the book and I am sure find some good things to take away but understanding many of the stories and examples would be difficult without some knowledge and understanding of American culture and recent history.
The third section of the book, "Social Obesity", Johnson returns to his enumeration of the ills caused by information obesity. The people who lose out due to poor information habits are not just the individuals but the society as a whole. Johnson invites readers to become a part of a "Vast Rational Conspiracy." I believe he is genuine in this call to action and that is what allows me to forgive some of the efforts around the book that look more self-serving. I believe he is truly trying to fuel a fundamental shift in discourse and knowledge in the United States. This also causes me to be more sympathetic about the geographical focus, though I think it is only fair that readers from other countries be warned. Johnson has created a call to action and he's starting with his home. I am sure he would love to see it spread and move beyond the borders of his native country. The skeptic would again see this happiness as a function of increased personal gain. I'm a little more optimistic, or maybe just a sucker.
This last section is the shortest. It includes a note to programmers that ought to at least be a bit of an ego boost, as they learn they are the new "scribes" of our age. Or having, as Johnson puts it, "...a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else." The appendix with further reading has some great pointers to good reading on-line and in books.
I've rated The Information Diet 8 of 10 because I think Johnson at moments loses the battle to not engage in the kind of objectivity that he advocates and because the book has such a regionally focused audience. That said, it has changed my behavior and I think that it has a positive place. In fact I've become an advocate for many of the ideas, even when I don't recommend the book itself. I recently ran into a barrage of emails from various co-workers advocating that we "turn off technology" because it is too distracting from real life. I found this to be rather annoying because there are always distractions and tech is also important and a force for better lives. The ideas in The Information Diet have given me options to offer people that let them gain control of the information sources in their life rather than giving up and just shutting them all off.
Will the The Information Diet have a great impact over time? I am really not sure. I think that it is definitely a precursor of things to come. Just by being published it will encourage others to copy it and I think we will see the parallel to physical diet and eating continue. But will Johnson finally achieve his goal of making the world a better place? Only time will tell, but I think it is a noble effort.
You can purchase The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I don't think that anyone would argue about the physical obesity problem. I think what readers may be skeptical about is this idea of information obesity. The premise that Johnson puts forward is that we have access to more information than ever before, much in the same way that developed nations have more food available than ever before. (I will let the reader continue to draw the parallels — this example should be enough to figure it out.) While we have more information than ever before, not all information is equal. Some information is good for us and some is not. Another problem is that we tend to seek certain kinds of information that can give us a skewed and inaccurate view of the world we live in. People have access to more information yet they become more ignorant.
Johnson is an activist. Much of his life has been about affecting change. He is very upfront about this and the book contains a large amount of biographical information. Of course this is because he must. Johnson is laying out an argument for digging past the fluff, the bias and finding ways to be informed by facts. But he has his own built in bias and internal spin that he must counter even as he encourages the reader to do the same. I think that for the most part he has managed to do this well, not necessarily by being completely objective but by being transparent. Some of his examples felt a little weak to me, but this is because I had such a different approach to the event, topic or people that he chose as examples. I think his underlying observations were correct, and his sharing freely about his background and default positions helped me to reconcile his main point with my reservations about the specific examples.
The first six chapters are part of the introduction section and lay out Johnson's case for the information obesity problem. The next four chapters are the actual "Information Diet". Here Johnson moves from describing the problem to full on advocacy. Always striving for objectivity Johnson is always quick to describe what science is out there to give light to his position. The problem is that there just isn't much of it out there. This means that the diet itself is a mix of what has seemed to work well for Johnson himself and some broad recommendations. This may be frustrating to anyone who is looking for hard and fast direction. It's not that Johnson doesn't give concrete suggestions, it's just that he can't claim any assurance that they will work for anyone but himself. That said, I think there is a good chance that many of his ideas about how we spend our time taking in information, how we find sources and tools as well as attitudes that may help seem to be good. I think that anyone who moves from being unaware of the issue to being intentional in how they take in information is better off by that change alone.
Working through this process of finding the "diet" that works for someone is something they may want to do with others. With this in mind, and I think reflecting Johnson's bent as an activist, there is an Information Diet web site with a blog, resources and information on things like events. It is tied into some social tools and so one is able to interact with other information dieters.
Unfortunately this site is at once a marketing tool for the book (hoped 'movement' I guess) and this reflects the constant tension that exists in the fact that Johnson is at once pushing for social change and seeking to profit at the same time. He is constantly in danger, while writing and in the external resources for the book, of violating the principles he is endorsing. A friend recently told me, "David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, which argues against procreation, dedicates this book to his parents." It's that appearance of contradiction that pops up here as well. I'm told to filter out more noise, seek out better information and twitter and if I like the idea here are the buttons to let the world know on Facebook, Twitter, g+ or email. It's not that this can't all be reconciled, it is just jarring. This is something that will drive skeptics nuts and I dinged my rating of the book for it, though I think the good outweighs the bad in this regard. Just because the site exists, I don't think that invalidates the thought and I don't have to go there. I feel I've benefited from the book alone.
The book is squarely aimed at an American audience. That's pretty clear from the get-go. Much of Johnson's life has been involved in American politics, the obesity metaphor works well for an American audience and so it makes sense that this would be the scope of the work. I think that is unfortunate because I believe there is a broader application for his ideas with regard to how information is processed and the explosion in the amount of information available. A person who is not an American could read the book and I am sure find some good things to take away but understanding many of the stories and examples would be difficult without some knowledge and understanding of American culture and recent history.
The third section of the book, "Social Obesity", Johnson returns to his enumeration of the ills caused by information obesity. The people who lose out due to poor information habits are not just the individuals but the society as a whole. Johnson invites readers to become a part of a "Vast Rational Conspiracy." I believe he is genuine in this call to action and that is what allows me to forgive some of the efforts around the book that look more self-serving. I believe he is truly trying to fuel a fundamental shift in discourse and knowledge in the United States. This also causes me to be more sympathetic about the geographical focus, though I think it is only fair that readers from other countries be warned. Johnson has created a call to action and he's starting with his home. I am sure he would love to see it spread and move beyond the borders of his native country. The skeptic would again see this happiness as a function of increased personal gain. I'm a little more optimistic, or maybe just a sucker.
This last section is the shortest. It includes a note to programmers that ought to at least be a bit of an ego boost, as they learn they are the new "scribes" of our age. Or having, as Johnson puts it, "...a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else." The appendix with further reading has some great pointers to good reading on-line and in books.
I've rated The Information Diet 8 of 10 because I think Johnson at moments loses the battle to not engage in the kind of objectivity that he advocates and because the book has such a regionally focused audience. That said, it has changed my behavior and I think that it has a positive place. In fact I've become an advocate for many of the ideas, even when I don't recommend the book itself. I recently ran into a barrage of emails from various co-workers advocating that we "turn off technology" because it is too distracting from real life. I found this to be rather annoying because there are always distractions and tech is also important and a force for better lives. The ideas in The Information Diet have given me options to offer people that let them gain control of the information sources in their life rather than giving up and just shutting them all off.
Will the The Information Diet have a great impact over time? I am really not sure. I think that it is definitely a precursor of things to come. Just by being published it will encourage others to copy it and I think we will see the parallel to physical diet and eating continue. But will Johnson finally achieve his goal of making the world a better place? Only time will tell, but I think it is a noble effort.
You can purchase The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
So being obese is like bittorrenting 50 gigs of music that you know you'll never listen to?
Don't go on a diet! Make the food take those calories back! Make the food RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD MAKE CLAY JOHNSON FAT!
There are numerous causes that ultimately lead to an imbalance in the ratio between the number of calories taken in to the number of calories burned.
Get it right! Calories is the wrong metric. The proper metric is the ratio between mass out and mass in.
My primary criticism of this book is that it was written 10 minutes at a time. The author even admits to this.
This creates "chapters" which rarely are more than a page, I think there was even 2 "chapters" on a single page at one point (Dan Brown eat your heart out).
He simply wrote the book in a blog format then tried collecting all of his "posts" into a single coherent book experience. He failed miserably in my opinion.
The ideas were brief and failed any follow through. I kept reading waiting for him to actually give me "the diet". All I got out of it was I needed to reduce my consumption of bad information.
Well no duh, that's why I stole the book in the first place, TELL ME HOW.
In fact, while I was reading the book I kept saying to myself that I should self-publish my own ideas about information consumption and could make some money since clearly the available writing talent and content on the subject is thin.
You go to most restaurants in the US and the server up way more food than you would/should want to consume. Portion sizes are horrendously huge .. but that is the expectation - just look at what has happened to the "standard" soda size. Back 40 years, 12oz used to be King Sized, now days that is less than a small size.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Clay Johnson believes that the issues the U.S. has with food, have become mirrored in how we consume information.
So the theory is walmart shoppers read too much... and thats a problem... show me a link on peopleofwalmart of someone with an excessive quantity of books and I'll believe it...
Did he write about fluff vs real literature? I believe the PC rallying cry in years past was against the western literature canon or some phrase like that, basically all the stuff I self educated myself with by reading and enjoying.
Does his book encourage zen meditation practice? Maybe something along the lines of all the benefits of meditation without the pesky religious connotations?
BTW thanks for publishing a review to a book not published by Packt.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
1. Make up some silly theory about some problem without any research or proof. ...
2. Say it has something to do with the Intertubes!
3. Write a book
4.
5. Profit!!!1!
Ambiguous non-recommendation gets an 8. I guess the scale is some sorta inverse logarithmic?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
author looks rather fat himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Johnson_%28technologist%29
Seems pretty obvious to me -- don't waste your time consuming junk like FB/twitter posts. I usually do it once a day and focus the rest of my day more important stuff.
Quoting another review: "He proposes conscious consumption of information which is not about consuming less, but developing a balanced and healthy habit just like when you go on diet..... The method describe there is very similar to the Pomodoro techinque, and there are plenty of great books on how to manage your tasks and stay focused (GTD, Personal Kanban)."
Another negative review:
"the first irony is that the book is fat. Everything interesting here could be said in a magazine article. Too many empty calories, alas.
"The second problem, and one I would hope most readers would care about, though I have my doubts, is the painfully obvious bias the author exhibits when he divides up information into "health food" and "junk food." Kudos to the author for at least acknowledging that he's a liberal who has worked in Democratic politics for years, but that still doesn't excuse the exquisitely obvious way that he divides up the landscape. For pages, I literally dreaded his first mention of Fox News (a station, I must note, that I never watch), for I knew it was coming, and I knew exactly what he would say about it. I won't bore the reader with the details--if you're honest, you know exactly what the most predictable leftist take on conservative media would be. Yet when you have high hopes for a book, to cringe, literally, as it becomes obvious what kind of flatulent, flat-footed bias will be passed off as objectivity... well, it was disheartening.
"I could add that, while I don't like any television news stations, what made the predictable Fox-bashing seem more horrible was the way it was couched in a defense of CNN as "the facts." For you see, Fox (and later MSNBC, cynically following Roger Ailes' model) is serving up the "cheese fries in gravy" equivalent of information sustenance, whereas CNN is just "the truth" and "the facts"-- a well-balanced, healthy diet of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper..... Maybe if CNN confirms YOUR bias, it can seem to you like just the "truth" and the "facts." But the idea that it is merely objective is, to put it mildly, absurd."
"There are lots of other silly things wrong with this book, such as when the author claims that the printing press ushered in the renaissance (a neat trick for Gutenberg to bring about Petrarch and Pico della Mirandola)..... Maybe it gets better after the first third. That's how much I could take before I decided to cut my losses and read something more nutritious."
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
This reminds me of my philosophy of science class. A scientific hypothesis must:
-be concise
-make *single* predictions given one set of inputs
For instance, consider a hypothesis of how gravity works as "any object that is thrown up into the air will either: fly up continuously, fall down eventually, fly to the left, or fly to the right" This isn't a scientific hypothesis since (almost) every possible outcome from "throwing an object in the air" is predicted. There's no way for that hypothesis to be proven wrong.
The internet acts, in a more general way, similarly to the above example. It's possible to find some website on the internet backing just about any claim, and every side of an issue. Don't think global warming is possible? There's a website out there that agrees with you and says you're right in thinking global warming is "wrong". Think global warming might/is caused by human activity? There's a website out there for *that*, too.
My solution has been to create a personal "white list" of sources that I trust. Math topics are generally covered well by mathworld.wolfram.com or reputable .edu sites, for instance. I'm skeptical about any math related mumbo jumbo outside of mathworld or a reputable .edu site. I've also got a math background and all of my course textbooks to cross reference.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The real issue really might be the type of info not the quantity. For diet, it's the type of calories that matter. I've started consuming lots of fat and reducing starch and other sugars without regard to total calorie count and my weight has dropped substantially and my health has improved as measured by lipid panels and my own athletic performance. Gotta be a an information analog. Plenty of junk out there on the intertubes along with good stuff.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
If you can make people unable to stop consuming your product then you have a goldmine.
Cigarette makers have officially nicotine to do that (they have more addictives but the law doesn't give a fsck)
and food makers have sugar. Not cane sugar but fructose/sucrose, corn syrup/sugar and HFCS. And it's everywhere! (even in table salt!)
Sugar The Bitter Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It seems that most of the information out there now tastes like despair.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nobody became obese or developed diabetes or heart disease from eating too much lettuce (there are other consequences, to be sure). Any number of "chicken" strips is too many, and any amount of movie theatre soda is too much. Sure, technically, you could eat these in sufficiently moderate quantities to avoid their inherently toxic effects, but few do. Moreover, they are engineered to induce you to consume the maximum amount you can stomach/afford.
Just opt out of the typical American garbage diet altogether and eat real food. Bonus -- you can eat until you are sated, not just until you feel too guilty to continue.
But what does Cave Johnson think? About the lemons?
There's a lot to be said for the "personalization" trend of places like Google and Facebook, where they shape all of your results according to what their algorithms think is most important to you. Can readers weigh in on how the consolidation of the internet has affected their own use of it?
I've found that rather than randomly browsing the web at large to find any particularly interesting page, my needs are primarily met by Wikipedia, Google's suite of apps, Facebook, Slashdot, and YouTube. Between the five of those, I've got almost all the bases covered, and my habits have *shaped* to not really imagine needing anything outside of those things. Other websites have become the outliers instead of the norm, and so I would say my "diet" has shifted because it's got a more consistent stream of media from these sites, but it's also being tailored to fit what I've become accustomed to. and I can actually mentally perceive my perception of the internet changing to accommodate it. It's erroneous I know, but I occasionally feel like the internet equivalent of a couch potato because the whole of the web is at my fingers, and I don't really browse to any of the other sites without a more specific need to. Things like Stumble are used by a lot of my friends, but most of the main information comes from those big five. I'm curious to hear the thoughts below.
The fattest man in the world is Keith Martin........he's British and lives in London, thank you very much!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2100052/Worlds-fattest-man-Keith-Martin-lives-London-58-stone.html
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
...for some I'm sure, but the idea that you are what you read is faulty. An intelligent person can tell if what their reading is complete BS or not. As Americans we've come to distrust our own eyes in favor of a benevolent authority to tell us what to believe. We want our information catered to our world views so we're all nice and cozy. But a true intellectual reads everything and makes all their decisions on their own without any help from anyone. The author has basically taken the fad diet and applied it to mental health. I do think our collective ADD is related to our obesity, but it has more to do with our malnourishment than our obesity. Most people don't realize that you can be fat and malnourished. But our food has no nutrients at all, it's just empty calories. (Even the stuff that's marketed as healthy like yogurt.) I think it's the hidden root of a lot of our problems. And I don't see how you can build a great society on sugar and wonder bread.
Theory is that if something is good, more is better. Food and information alike
There you go, I've said it in one line.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Ironically, this book is about 140 to 150 pages too long.
Also, if this review was shorter, there might have been a chance that I would have read it.
Americans may be the most overweight, but there is no obesity epidemic, obesity is not the biggest killer, and one third of us are not obese.
The entire obesity epidemic was based on the bmi, which does not apply to how fat you are. It simply measures your height vs your weight. It's a gimmick used by the diet industries and politicians. Any one who had done any weight training throws the scale completely out of whack.
If your arnt convinced, just look around, statistically, according to the bmi, one on the purple you see should be very fat. I'm sick of hearing about this obesity bull shit.