
The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Mass affirmation is the refined sugar of the mind — I’m not talking about the kind of relatively rare positive affirmation you get from friends or family, telling you that you’re loved and respected. Rather, it’s the mass affirmation: the affirmations you get that aren’t intended for you specifically, the stuff that television is best at, but also
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Because of demand, Walmart is now the single largest provider of local, organic foods to the market. The result: the entire food industry is changing and following suit so its foods can be sold in Walmart stores.
Clay A. Johnson • The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences. Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new
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Should corporations building personalization algorithms include mutations to break a reader’s filter bubble?
Clay A. Johnson • The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
Now sometimes this won’t work for you — you may want to pay more attention for longer spurts of time.
Clay A. Johnson • The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
If you’re in one of the dozens of cities lucky enough to be covered by Everyblock, I highly recommend it as an important daily source of information. The site aggregates dozens of data feeds that come from local governments and turns them into an easy-to-read, relatively opinion-free way of seeing what’s going on at the block level — and you’d be s
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Readability charges a minimum membership fee of $5.00 per month that you can increase to however much you want. It takes 30% of the membership fee as its own, then allocates the remaining 70% to the content providers that you read through the service. It’s an invisible, transparent way to support content providers without having to wade through adv
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I try to limit myself to no more than 30 minutes a day of mass affirmation, and strive to consume much less. It
Clay A. Johnson • The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
Kickstarter lets you see what some people (the self-selecting group that uses the service) are passionate about — whether it’s building the world’s largest database, performing analysis of hip-hop music, or writing a guidebook to breakfast joints in Columbus, Ohio. It lets you browse local projects, too, so you can see what kinds of things are star
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