JFDee
Senior Member.
I stumbled upon an enlightening interview on a well respected (German) newspaper's web site.
The guest was Clay Johnson who has just released his book "The Information Diet". To put it in a nutshell, he draws an analogy between attractive fast food and the necessity to resist it on one hand, and on the other hand the ease of finding information bits in the Internet which confirm one's own point of view, no matter how far out that lies.
It seems strange to autotranslate an interview to English which was most likely conducted in that language originally, but here you go:
Direct link to translation
I found an English interview on the NPR site, with some transcriptions and an excerpt from the book. I have not yet listened to the whole thing, but in the transcripton he offers obvious but still valuable advice:
"Seek. Not too much. Mostly facts. Eat low on the sort of 'information food chain,' and stick close to sources. If it's an article about a bill in Congress, or even at a statehouse somewhere, going deep and actually trying to read the bill itself is really, I think, advantageous."
Here is the NPR page:
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145101748/is-it-time-for-you-to-go-on-an-information-diet
IMHO, the "fast food" analogy can be enlightening when trying to make sense of the growing pile of bunk out there, and how people react.
The guest was Clay Johnson who has just released his book "The Information Diet". To put it in a nutshell, he draws an analogy between attractive fast food and the necessity to resist it on one hand, and on the other hand the ease of finding information bits in the Internet which confirm one's own point of view, no matter how far out that lies.
It seems strange to autotranslate an interview to English which was most likely conducted in that language originally, but here you go:
Direct link to translation
I found an English interview on the NPR site, with some transcriptions and an excerpt from the book. I have not yet listened to the whole thing, but in the transcripton he offers obvious but still valuable advice:
"Seek. Not too much. Mostly facts. Eat low on the sort of 'information food chain,' and stick close to sources. If it's an article about a bill in Congress, or even at a statehouse somewhere, going deep and actually trying to read the bill itself is really, I think, advantageous."
Here is the NPR page:
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145101748/is-it-time-for-you-to-go-on-an-information-diet
IMHO, the "fast food" analogy can be enlightening when trying to make sense of the growing pile of bunk out there, and how people react.