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<\/a>It’s also a good time to catch up with reading.\u00a0 This past weekend I read a slim book, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption<\/em>, by Clay A. Johnson.\u00a0 We’ve had speakers come to campus to talk about managing information overload, but Johnson’s book is different.\u00a0 While he does encourage us to consume less, he also wants us to consume better.<\/p>\nJohnson likens so much of the information we all consume to junk food.\u00a0 There’s lots of crappy stuff out there, and sadly, all of us are consuming it.\u00a0 What’s worse, the media companies are creating content that’s personalized for us.\u00a0 Liberal?\u00a0 MSNBC has just what you’re looking for.\u00a0 Conservative?\u00a0 Fox has you covered.\u00a0 Beyond that, however, Johnson looks into how media companies track internet search trends in real time, with freelance writers quickly writing and posting content that’s likely to draw us in.<\/p>\n
The results? Media companies make a healthy profit as we click through “news stories” written just for people who have the same perspectives we do.\u00a0 They make cash from the ads that are displayed.\u00a0 Unfortunately for us, we aren’t reading information; we’re receiving affirmation of our biases.\u00a0 While groups have always had our differences, the level of anger in the conversation seems to get worse all the time.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because both sides of any given position are being fed tidbits that reinforce their beliefs.\u00a0 Johnson, who quit his job with the Sunlight Foundation after he realized that putting the facts out there isn’t sufficient to support an educated political dialog.<\/p>\n
Johnson encourages us to consume our information more carefully.\u00a0 Instead of clicking on the ehow.com link that will tell you just what you were hoping someone would tell you, try looking for information.\u00a0 Often that means you need to try to obtain the original source documents, or at least get as close as you can to them.\u00a0 Libraries, of course, are excellent for helping with this kind of thing.\u00a0 But perhaps I’m showing my bias there.<\/p>\n
Read Johnson’s book yourself.\u00a0 See what you think.\u00a0 While I am not particularly interested in the web site efforts Johnson proposes in the late parts of his book, I do think it’s vital not only to politics, but to discourse in general that we seek information, not affirmation.\u00a0 After I finished reading, I took a walk through my bookmarks and removed several that I’ll be better off without.<\/p>\n
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For those of us working in higher education information technology, summer is not down time.\u00a0 Summer is a mad dash to update everything, to report on what we accomplished over the last year, and to make our plans for the … Continue reading