Eating Only Dessert: Why Your Information Diet Is Probably Terrible [Feature]
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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