Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a book review by Romi Mahajan. The subject of the review is The Information Diet by Clay Johnson. Also check out the upcoming episode of RomiCast with Romi Mahajan, in which Romi will discuss The Information Diet. The RomiCast series is brought to you by Research Access and Metavana.
For reasons soon to be obvious, this piece will be brief.
I know just enough of Philosophy to remember Hegel’s (or was it Kant’s) view that the thesis and antithesis together make the synthesis. And given that the progress of thought happens via the construction of increasingly complex and thoughtful syntheses, I want to offer congratulations to Clay Johnson for his book The Information Diet and to his publisher for creating ever-more surface area for attack. The irony of a book admonishing us to consume information carefully is not lost on any of us. Nevertheless, The Information Diet is worth reading and even re-reading. Indeed, it takes us to a new and higher perch from which we can clearly see just what harms are being done to us by the tsunami of Disney-fied, Fast-Faddish information. We reach a more refined synthesis.
Clay Johnson, Author, The Information Diet
To make a clear point about the need for sensible information consumption, Johnson creates an interesting construct- that we ought to think about information consumption just as we think about food consumption. There are bad calories and good calories, foods with terrible somatic affects and others that nourish us and make us healthy. Just as the West (and the newly “rich” developing countries) are suffering from an epidemic of bodily obesity, so too has the Information Age ushered in new disease-information obesity- with all the attendant bodily and mental effects.
While he doesn’t use these precise words, Johnson’s analysis goes beyond the individual body to talk about a diseased body-politic. Our collective body, the very structure that keeps our sociality animated, healthy, and productive, is being Twinkied and Ding-Donged in the very same way as each of our own bodies. Johnson points out the symptoms of this disease- “Confident Ignorance,” Agnotology,” “Epistemic Closure,” and “Filter Failure.” As he describes these symptoms, one recognizes the disease instantaneously.
The thesis of Johnson’s work is quite clear- and it is powerful.
So where’s the tension, the dialectic discomfort that required an invocation of Hegel at the opening?
I believe Johnson missed the chance to write a mordant piece of social, political, and economic criticism. While, in a conscious act of puncturing my own filter bubble, I encourage people to read this book (buy it, borrow it, steal it, but don’t just read the back cover) I believe Johnson missed the bigger story.
Which is to say that the book does not encourage us to break out of what I call the Echo-Chamber of Web Neo-Positivism (undoubtedly a lot of saturated fat in that phrase!) Because Information overload is not a new phenomenon nor are its ills only recently understood; instead, the creators of digital information factories have completely dominated agenda-setting in the last two decades and as such have been purveying the falsehood that information, Web 2.0 technologies, and social networks are tools of liberation. Against this backdrop of inscrutability, of unstinted devotion to the Church of the Internet, any attempt to admonish us into breaking out of the Echo Chamber is good but most attempts are simply insufficient. If, as they would have us believe, the rise of people in the Arab worlds was a “Twitter Revolution” then I’ll submit that in the Echo Chamber, even “friends” offer us Big Macs and call them Organic and belly-busting. (That food and food prices drove much of the anger that led to these revolutions provides an interesting kernel that Johnson could have popped, buttered, and delivered with ease.)
So the real synthesis will come when people use the tools of so-called liberation and point the turret (as has Siva Vaidyanathan in his book, The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry)) at the new information oligarchy. You all know who they are.
Which brings me to three final criticisms of Johnson’s important work. First, he blithely exonerates large companies. The emphasis on the culpability of the consumer is unfortunate; this is the slippery slope that company executives love. This exoneration reminds me of the age-old (and thinly veiled class-bating) debates over whether Fast Food joints should be at fault for the death-creating food they purvey or whether “those people” who eat there should be held responsible for their own actions.
Second, in what appears to be an attempt to be publishable, Johnson is a bit too “fair and balanced.” Yes, I said that. As an example, on page 140 Johnson asks us to “take our country back, not from the right or the left, but from the crazy partisanship on both sides.” This “all –isms are equal” view is just a weak brew of relativism and has no place in a book that is all about taking positions. When Johnson continues and asks us to give the country “to the stewards that have made the country so great, the pragmatists- the ones who want to create a more perfect union,” I’m forced to wonder whether his own Filter Bubble has kept him away from the requisite reading of American history that concedes some elements of greatness but asks “at what cost in lives and liberty here and abroad?”
Finally, while the information-food analogy is interesting, Johnson at places loses the power of his argument by force-fitting us into the construct on which the book is premised.
Criticism is, however, easy. It’s as easy as being in the Echo Chamber. So please do read this book and extract from it important lessons and even some great techniques to avoid the disease.
Finally, if you are anything like me, the book reminded you of one of the greatest Rock songs of all time- Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission.)” To me, it is the best Information Overload song of all time:
I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored.
I been John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d.
I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I’m blind.
I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded
Communist, ’cause I’m left-handed.
That’s the hand I use, well, never mind!
I been Phil Spectored, resurrected.
I been Lou Adlered, Barry Sadlered.
Well, I paid all the dues I want to pay.
And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce,
And all my wealth won’t buy me health,
So I smoke a pint of tea a day.
I knew a man, his brain was so small,
He couldn’t think of nothing at all.
He’s not the same as you and me.
He doesn’t dig poetry. He’s so unhip that
When you say Dylan, he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain’t got no culture,
But it’s alright, ma,
Everybody must get stoned.
I been Mick Jaggered, silver daggered.
Andy Warhol, won’t you please come home?
I been mothered, fathered, aunt and uncled,
Been Roy Haleed and Art Garfunkeled.
I just discovered somebody’s tapped my phone.
I lost my harmonica, Albert.
