Clay A. JohnsonBesprekingen

There really is no government or private mechanism to regulate the information habits of the average citizen. Clay Johnson believes there should be voluntary dieting of information habits. We're reading to much crap, Johnson says. or rather, we're consuming to much crap from radio, television, and movies. Except, I don't listen to radio anymore and only turn on television to pick something off Netflix occasionally. I think Johnson isn't talkng about me, except he is, because he includes people who junk out on e-mail, Twitter, and, most assuredly, facebook. And how many people read newspapers anymore? At one end of the spectrum Johnson is a technocrat who suggests using technology to get at the facts and avoid all that self-affirmation stuff people get through their favourite information sources. It's not good enough to read lefty sources if you're a lefty. It's not good enough to watch Fox News if you're a righty. We end up just reading and hearing what we already believe and not gaining perspective. I kind of agree with Johnson and I try very hard to accumulate perspective through a variety of online tools, my favourites being Flipboard, Zite and (sorry) facebook. In the old days we used to send our children to school and hope they got educated. Today our schools are behind our children in knowing "what's going on." or even, how to find out what's going on. Really, "school" is an obsolete concept, at least it's obsolete in as a mechanism for giving us perspective. It's still a pretty good place to learn about the solar system, and arithmatic. But perspective? Eh.

I like the message of this book and its metaphor. But for whatever reason, the abundance of computer-based solutions left me feeling cold. I plan on taking the advice to heart, but will use some of my own methods to reduce the glut of bad information "calories" and needless attention-stealers from my life.

I also feel like the already slim book was padded out to be an acceptable book length. Maybe because I've already books that critique the media, I found myself skimming or skipping many of the sections of the book. But on the positive side, that makes it easier to get the important points from the book!

This could have been a great book. Unfortunately, the shallow treatment of the subject, the weak citations of often secondary or tertiary sources, and the failure of call to arms to utilize some of the most important components of digital literacy (librarians and other information pros as guides for literacy, for example) really killed the good mojo.

I think he also failed, in a big way to remind those who already have or want to have good information diets to become resources themselves by volunteering with their local officials to help them with their own information diets. Newly elected officials may find that they need help organizing or synthesizing the information they now encounter.

I was disappointed that his emphasis lay with the larger urban settings in many contexts. I also found myself wishing he used more seminal works in the field of neuroscience, information science, and learning. There are still good nuggets of information here, it just failed to live up to the hype for me.

I picked this book up out of curiosity mostly. I found it somewhat underwhelming. Part of the reason I found it falling short is that, to be honest, a lot of what Johnson preaches is information literacy repackaged. It's what good instruction librarians, and just good librarians in general, have been doing for years, even long before the Internet that he seems so fixated on. That was the other thing that did not endear me to the book: the often elitist assumption that Internet access is easy to get and that everyone can get it. There is such a thing as a digital divide, and the author just seemed to either miss it or ignore it. Also, he tries a bit too hard to remain neutral, and I have to say, there are times when one side is wrong. Pure and simple. This is not something we need to get relativistic about. In addition, if you are well-read already, and you keep up pretty well, then a lot of the book up to the point he gets to the actual information diet is a backgrounder that you can either skim or skip. There are some interesting things now and then, but unless you don't keep up much, they are not really new. As for the plan itself, let me save you time: be selective of your information sources, be balanced, cancel your cable, get it all off the Internet (because we all know broadband is easy to get and ubiquitous). I did take some notes as I read, so I will likely do a longer write-up of the book in my blog. For now, I will say I was not really impressed. This book could have just been a long magazine article. Or the content could have just been left at the companion website.

Highly recommended. This diet could improve your life.

I was brought to this book by poor information-which is amazing in itself. It was suggested to me by a publisher and was not the information I had set out to originally find. That being said-I thought it started strong with ideas, but then slowed and I found myself struggling to get back into it. I think its worth a look, but unless you have a desire to use the book as a thesis for an argument, or are really interested in the idea behind the consumption of information-might not be for you. I think its important to be aware of the ideas in the book and the author did a great job drawing comparisons, and being honest with the reader. But it's a difficult task to be clever and funny (which it definitely is at some points) while presenting a proof. I enjoyed the information, flow, and statistics-but I would rather describe to a friend the thesis behind it, than have them consume the manuscript. Which I think is one of the main points of the book. Overall a 3 star for me-I am excited that I read and absorbed some of the ideas in the book (and am hopefully a more efficient and educated consumer because of it). But I am not sure I would go back to it.

I was brought to this book by poor information-which is amazing in itself. It was suggested to me by a publisher and was not the information I had set out to originally find. That being said-I thought it started strong with ideas, but then slowed and I found myself struggling to get back into it. I think its worth a look, but unless you have a desire to use the book as a thesis for an argument, or are really interested in the idea behind the consumption of information-might not be for you. I think its important to be aware of the ideas in the book and the author did a great job drawing comparisons, and being honest with the reader. But it's a difficult task to be clever and funny (which it definitely is at some points) while presenting a proof. I enjoyed the information, flow, and statistics-but I would rather describe to a friend the thesis behind it, than have them consume the manuscript. Which I think is one of the main points of the book. Overall a 3 star for me-I am excited that I read and absorbed some of the ideas in the book (and am hopefully a more efficient and educated consumer because of it). But I am not sure I would go back to it.

Review forthcoming

This could have been a great book. Unfortunately, the shallow treatment of the subject, the weak citations of often secondary or tertiary sources, and the failure of call to arms to utilize some of the most important components of digital literacy (librarians and other information pros as guides for literacy, for example) really killed the good mojo.

I think he also failed, in a big way to remind those who already have or want to have good information diets to become resources themselves by volunteering with their local officials to help them with their own information diets. Newly elected officials may find that they need help organizing or synthesizing the information they now encounter.

I was disappointed that his emphasis lay with the larger urban settings in many contexts. I also found myself wishing he used more seminal works in the field of neuroscience, information science, and learning. There are still good nuggets of information here, it just failed to live up to the hype for me.

A somewhat lengthy discussion on the ideas of 'information overload', and how the glut of the new forms of passive media (TV, the internet) allow people to unconsciously follow those sources which confirm their biases.

Therefore, what is necessary is to limit overexposure and overwork, and follow a good balance of sources in order to prevent distortion of your point of view, and make sure to critically analyze the sources of your information (including book reviews).

Seems a bit obvious and lengthy (perhaps it should be article-length), but the author does use a neat metaphor to describe it all. Think of information as a diet. Don't take in too much, do some exercise, make sure what you take in is good. Simple as that.

The Information Diet is a strong analysis of the problems with our information consumption that falters as it seeks to find a solution. The book is built around a central metaphor: our problems with information are like our problems with obesity in that, like with food, it's not a matter of consuming too much but a matter of consuming too much that is low-quality, nutritionally-empty, but cheap and "tasty." In this case, this information equivalent of junk food is fear-mongering and affirmation that we are right. It's a solid metaphor on the whole, but Johnson often takes it too seriously. As he puts it, "this isn't just a fancy metaphor. It's real." (7) The problem is that it is a metaphor, even a good one, which means that he should be able to abandon it when it isn't the best way to express a certain part of his argument but cannot.

However, one of his major conclusions, "infoveganism," is basically untenable and is a strong example of where his metaphor falls apart. Johnson describes "infoveganism" as accessing the least processed information (78); which is to say, straight data with no analysis or interpretation (honestly, it's more of an "info-raw food diet," but whatever). Johnson is right that "reading the public filings of companies from the SEC is likely to give you more benefit than listening to Jim Cramer smash things on CNBC" (140). Yet that is only true if you have developed enough of an expertise in understanding businesses and the market to make heads or tails of this data. You need to invest a lot of time learning in order to be able to do so. Yet, we don't have time to be specialists in everything that affects our lives. We don't even have time to have background knowledge in everything. I know I don't, and I'm in the library field, which at times feels like one of the few remaining professions that encourages knowing a little bit of everything. That's the reason these third parties exist, to interpret information we don't have time to investigate for ourselves.

This is where the "infoveganism" falls apart: since we have to rely on third parties for understanding much of the information that is relevant to our lives, being data literate requires the ability to evaluate these third parties, which does not make it into Johnson's four components of data literacy. Yet it is so essential. After all, there is plenty of room in between SEC filings and Jim Cramer, but you need to be able to evaluate why one third party is providing more reliable interpretation and analysis than another, but Johnson never to my memory deal with that straight on. He hints at it, such as in his exhortation to watch CSPAN over Fox and MSNBC (139), but he fails to identify his methods for doing so (and seems unaware of the vast literature on how to evaluate information). Thus, The Information Diet is a solid starting point for understanding the nature of our "information obesity," but some of its major conclusions are probably unworkable.

New Year's Resolution for 2013: stay healthy regarding your information consumption. Study and practice The Information Dietby Clay Johnson. Johnson helps you to make choices to avoid information overconsumption. His first claim: information overload doesn't exist, just as food overload is nonexistent. It's the amount and - more important - quality that you consume, that makes or breaks your (mental) health. The author digs this metaphor over and over again and shares good practices for better information consumption, such as:
setting priorities and turn away from distractions. Turn off notification bleeps and icons, spend larger amounts of time concentrating on one task. Think of the lessons in Timothy Ferris' 4 Hours Work Week, the psychological concept of flow and David Allen's Getting Things Done.
avoid reading and watching likeminded sources of information. Get challenged, seek diversity, opposing view points and new insights to keep you fresh and hopefully better informed.
Use social media, but be aware of their shortcomings when it comes to desinformation on purpose. Do research, check, dig into the deeper web, go to a traditional library.
After this practical and very useful howto's Johnson describes the political landscape and information spinning process in the US, less relevant to non-US readers like me. True to the spirit of the book, I disregarded that part as an unnecessary waste of time and attention.

Beyond the first taste
For those willing to take the message seriously informationdiet.com offers a huge amount of additional resources like Meetup info on local chapters to join, Google+ Hangout to interact with the author, software tips for a healthy information diet like adblockers, rescuetime and sanebox, and other books on the topic.

When I began rationing (and rationalizing) my internet usage because I was spending too much time on the Internet I realized this was fundamentally about how I process information - email, Facebook, and link hopping.

CAJ says to treat your information like food. In Part One he makes the argument of comparing information to food and why we enjoy consuming so much of both. My favorite part was that consuming the same 'junk' information will strengthen our 'reality dysmorphia,' a cognitive version of 'body dysmorphia.' He makes the case on why there is junk information in the first place (AOL Way, Big Tobacco), and how too much information can lead to very real physical side effects - being sedentary, email apnea (really - we breath more shallow when checking our email), loss of focus from notifications (increased heart rate after reading a text message), and a poor sense of time.

Part two is on how to have a healthy information diet - having data literacy (CAJ suggests data literacy in the future will be like knowing how to read a 100 years ago), a sense of humor, and a method of training to improve our executive functioning. There are many good quid bits here: 'Respect good content, disrespect advertisements,' 'Avoid over processed information,' and 'balance means keeping our desire for affirmation in check.'

It's the Food, Inc. of news, information, media, and politics.Why FoxNews and MSNBC are the informational equivalents of HFCS and pressed corn and soy products.I'd highly recommend this book to anyone suffering from "information overload" or who is even remotely concerned with it.

This is one of those books that everyone needs to read. It's short. So it won't take long, but it gets you thinking (and hopefully talking) about some very important points that many of us have not yet thought about.

In order for our country and culture to remain stable we must be well informed. Johnson does a good job of quickly outlining how and why we are becoming less informed these days. To be honest, half of the stuff he mentions - you probably already know. But you just haven't thought about the implications. The "diet" metaphor isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Mainly because it's not so much 'counting calories' but thinking about the quality of what you are consuming and where it comes from (hint: local is better in food and information.)

Things like 'what's the difference in getting your news via Facebook rather than straight from a new source' or 'just how much do CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Washington Post, NY Times alter a story/headline to make it "more compelling"' and so on. This is one of those books that you will read and then will find yourself bringing it up in conversations for the next two weeks. It helps that the author is so up front with his political leanings so that we know where things are coming from. It allows the reader to follow him honestly and listen to the causes of much of what is changing in the media landscape.

The book not only does a good job of quickly showing how our news sources alter and filter information for us, but it also begins to explain why. Which starts us down the path of trying to fix the problems. The last bit of the book does contain some concrete "how to"' information and a pretty strong call to action.

My only complaint is that this wake up call/manifesto is as short as it is. The call to action and tool set offered at the end would have been a little more compelling if backed by some deeper discussion. But then the book would have been longer... and thus, not as approachable. This is one I wish everyone would take an afternoon to read. It's a solid 4 out of 5 for me.

(In the spirit of full disclosure I did receive this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.)

Humans do not deal well with wretched excess.

Author Clay Johnson makes this the point of his book The Information Diet. Equating food and information, Johnson makes the case that unconscious over-consumption of food or information misses the point of the exercise. Instead of nuturing or knowledge accumulation the result instead is a malady. Finding balance and limits is the key and Johnson lays out how to do this against the masses of information most of us can easily become buried under.

I enjoyed the book. Johnson has a writing style I found both informative and highly amusing. I found several of the book's topics very interesting; one being the idea of 'confirmation bias' (where you acquire information solely for the purpose of supporting beliefs you already hold) and how mass media expoits this tendency. Another was his recommendation that information comsumption be skewed towards a more local and immediate level; an area that is all too frequently ignored in the splash and circus of the national/global arena of news dissemination. I especially appreciated his emphasis on becoming an active producer of information as opposed to a passive consumer. My only complaint about this book is sometimes the food/info analogy became a bit strained. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to cultivate an objective and thoughtful mindset towards information.

The main point of the book is that we are consuming the wrong kind of information, the kind that only affirms our beliefs and does not challenge them. I do think the writer has a point there. However, the metaphor "consuming information is like consuming food" has quite a few problems. One is the obvious one, there is no physical substrate for consuming information. I.e., when we don't consume enough food, our bodies get hungry. When we get no information, or too much, or the wrong kind, we have no such direct feedback. It might have something to do with the tendency in today's world to see obesity as a mental problem. And that brings us to the second one: our understanding of food diets is not that good, which means the "normal" advice to an overweight person (eat less, exercise more) is one that is known not to work in the long term. If we had a better idea of what food we should eat, it might help to make this parallel, but a parallel from one conflicting field to another conflicting one is not going to help. And lastly, the advice given in this book to improve the information we consume, is so complicated that I think only a tiny fraction of the people reading the book will apply it. And that will be the fraction that least needs it.
Interesting idea, but not much more than that.½

This ER book was overall good. There are some soft bits at the beginning where we wander places we have no need to go and the metaphor gets really over-extended in my view by the end of the book in the "infoveganism" and "how to consume" sections, but the main content is clearly presented and well argued. There is a lot of cross-references to other recent book commentary on the internet information deluge/ fact famine that seems to be happening- [The shallows]; [The Filter Bubble]. I'm UK/ EU based so a fair amount of the USA-centred (or USA centered if you prefer) politics examples and CNN/ Fox News and others just don't resonate hard with me. Attention, focus and distractibility are really getting important. I've always had the internet available to me since my working life started and I can remember in the start that only rarely did I need to go online and that there were clear deliniations between work and play websites. Now, there are some very grey areas and it does take will power and attention to keep focussed on what you wanted to know. I can legitimately go on wikipedia and msn money to research out companies, but once there some shiny-things can distract me and 10 minutes later I'm looking at biographies of bands I've heard on the radio on the way to work or amazon looking at what books come out soon or just reading news websites like BBC. So, OK, I can agree with the basic message.

The "how to consume" section of working just isn't directed at my general working day- it is much more for a home-office journalist/ programmer style worker producing words/ copy. The final chapter of "people who are programmers like me should get into politics" was frankly a bit weird and ego-centric. Personally of course I think more Biologist, Logisticians who like Pink Floyd should be ruling the country but maybe my biases might be showing there... So, a curates egg of a book with the middle 40-50% being very good, a slow start and a slightly bizarre wrap-up.½

I was expecting this book to mainly be "preaching to the choir". I've been concerned about the state of information and misinformation available today, and how many people don't know the difference. This book moved beyond that to provide ideas about how we can change our information habits to consciously avoid "fast food information gathering". It's not easy, but unless you're conscious of the information choices you're making, it will be almost impossible to change.

I liked the analogy to the food problem. I think it'll make things much clearer to people who are new to the idea of information bloat. I also like that it was more action-oriented rather than research-oriented. There are many books which discuss neurophysiology, so people can always go there for more in-depth background information.

I expected the diet metaphor to get strained, but it actually worked better than I expected: consume less-processed information just like you consume less-processed food, and don't consume mindlessly and continuously. The author's approach to dealing with information "obesity" isn't the standard reactionary "Get off the internet! Go play outside!" but a more nuanced look at how to consume better information rather than just less. I particularly liked the looks into why headlines are terrible (overdone and outright false headlines get clicks, clicks = money), and how using your friends to filter information can result in a dangerously narrow point of view. I was less thrilled about how much of the examples were very American politics oriented, but obviously the author has to write from what he knows. And politics in America does provide some interesting examples of over-information warfare, as it were.

What's most striking about this book to me aren't the ideas, though (as a research scientist, going to the source and avoiding "junk" information is already part of my daily routine), but the fact that it's a life-hacking book that doesn't suffer from extreme bloat where the author repeats himself endlessly for 300+ pages. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the topic, that the author would be able to write succinctly, but after my experience trying to read volumes like The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done, this brevity and ability to get the point across in a nice slim volume were much appreciated.

In the last twenty years the world has changed irrevocably. The changes brought about by the spread of the Internet, coupled with the IT revolution, have spawned an Information revlution where never have so many people had access to to so much information. Nowadays it is perfectly normal to read the online edition of a newspaper from half a world away, or indeed to use Google or Wikipedia to check everything from Edward IV’s lovers, to reviews of the new restaurant that’s opened a couple of blocks down the street.

The information revolution has spawned a swag of books about it. Crudely they can be categorised ones that say “it’s wonderful, fantastic, look how exciting it is” and others that say “we’re drowning, we’re overwhelmed and cant’t cope with the firehose of information that is the internet”

This book is in the latter category, and attempts to argue the case for managing one’s news consumption in a sustaniable form and to strive to be well informed rather than highly informed, in short to be selective about what you read and to educate yourself about what the content means.

So far so good. We can all agree that it is incredibly easy to be distracted by the booming buzzing confusion that is the internet. Johnson has a political agenda about the replacement of true news and journalism with faux news - the pseudo dreck served up in place of news with its endles focus on the sex lives of minor celebrities rather than things of real import.

In explaining how this came about Johnson has some interesting things to say, but this is an incoherent book. While he has some interesting things to say about the rise of content over news and some decent stories about the effects of this - stuff that would make a few interesting and entertaining blog posts but spoils it by over stretching his analogy between the junk food industry and the content management industry in which faux news exists to sell advertising. He also doesn’t do himself any favours by citing some pop psychology and psychophysiology - the fun stuff that some loony professor always comes out with but has never been investigated with any degree of rigour

This is also a very American book - in arguing how we should consume selectively and educate ourselves about the content rather than get lost in the sea of meaningless posts about irrelevant things that constitutes most of the information on offer his examples and some of his ideas on controlling you information don’t travel well.

His solutions, tips and tricks as to how to cope with the firehose are fairly standard. Nothing revolutionary, but basically about making lists, structuring your day and avoid the irrelevant, not that different from “getting things done’ applied to the internet. All sensible, but ignoring the fact that most people are not actually very good at structuring their lives.

That said the book has a decent argument behind it. In the same way as the protestant reformations of the 1500‘s encouraged people to take responsibilty for their own lives and educate themselves in matters of faith and doctrine, indirectly incouraging both literacy and independent thought, Johnson is arguing that we should equally literate about the information we consume and be more critical in our assessment of the worth of the information we consume, something that clearly has implications about how we interact with the world. While you might disagree, it is certainly an argument worth having.

While I didn’t like the book and thought it fairly trite at times I’d certainly like to have a beer and an argument with Clay Johnson about some of his ideas.

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay Johnson should have been a great book. The premise was interesting. Let's learn to be more effective consumers of information. Unfortunately, the book skimmed the surface and never really got to the point. Instead, Johnson spent much of the book focusing on political topics and weaving in anecdotes that missed the mark. The book does a nice job talking about how much bad information is out there, but provides few concrete suggestions for "conscious consumption" in everyday life. While I generally like books that use a metaphor, I found a bit too much in this text. The general idea of linking information consumption with food and obesity was great, however it seemed to go on and on.

Overall the book was interesting and a quick read, but it didn't really match the title and description.

Johnson makes three main points: that we gorge on information, that much of it is junk (biased and reaffirming our beliefs), and that as a society this is problematic. He links all three points to nutrition and obesity, an analogy that is often fortunate, but doesn't always work. Johnson's proposed solutions are rather idiosyncratic, and his dismissal of other books discussing related issues (such as Carr's "The Shallows") is unfair. But if the reader uses this book as a starting point to evaluate her own information "consumption", then it will be a worthy read.½

Clay A. Johnson, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that created and managed Obama's 2008 online campaign site, and more recently the director of Sunlight Labs (an online organization dedicated to making government information more easily accessible) thinks we have a problem with information consumption. Similar to the alarm bells sounded by Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," Johnson points to both our ever-shortening attention spans and to the deficiency of the content we're consuming (websites, emails, TV, radio, tweets, "churnalism," etc.)

His prescription for healthier brains and happier, less disconnected and distracted lives is balance and conscious consumption. Just as our brains can be "trained" to crave that dopamine burst when a new email arrives, our executive functions can be trained to focus longer and longer on challenging, authoritative texts. It's simply a matter of building willpower and utilizing online tools to track how we spend our time. Johnson recommends deliberately exposing ourselves to alternative points of view, intentionally avoiding adds with the help of tools like Readability.com, and building our knowledge base is a systematic way with the help of sites like Khan Academy and TED. His arguments for conscious information consumption are well-presented and persuasive.

He lost me at "infoveganism". The overreaching requirement to tie everything back to the stilted analogy of information consumption to food consumption was too much to bear.

Perhaps there was an overarching theme here with a message for today, but I missed it. This felt more like eleven blog posts about his favorite people who think differently were gathered, lengthened by 2-3X, then randomly assigned places in the table of contents, then rushed to print. Sometimes the short form does not need to enter the long form to be relevant.

Not recommended unless you are required to study everything said about popular consumption of Internet sources. 2/5 stars because I suspect there is the germ of a good idea here, it just got drowned on the way to print.