Our Changing Information Diet

Since the first moment that our Hayes Smartmodems successfully connected to a network, we have been on the hunt for new digital information. We all search for information in order to understand the world in which we live. The consumption of information provides each of us with power that allows us to shape our lives.

Prior to using Prodigy and AOL, I used to dial into Wildcat! bulletin board systems, hungry for knowledge on X-Wing and TIE Fighter game tips. Over the last the 20+ years, the tools that I employed to find and consume information online have evolved rapidly, from basic AOL keyword searches to URLs to Portals (Excite, Altavista), and from Directory Search (Yahoo) to Keyword Query Search (Google) to Social Bookmarks (Delicious, Digg), and finally to Activity Streams (such as Facebook newsfeed and Twitter) where my social graph of connections has become something of a real-time search engine with a life of its own. With each consumption shift, the amount of information I consume each day – or my information diet – has steadily increased to the point where I simply cannot ingest any more without it adversely affecting my daily performance.

Recently, I have been thinking about how our food consumption and information consumption habits actually closely resemble each other. Just as food is the energy source for our bodies, information is the energy source for our minds. Our body’s health is heavily influenced by the quality of our nutritional habits. Consuming foods high in fat, sugar, and other unhealthy elements can lead to a variety of health problems, causing a deterioration of one’s quality of life. Similarly, if we have a poor information diet (i.e. consistently watching reality TV and internet meme videos), our mind’s performance, clarity, and ability to achieve goals can be severely negatively impacted. Although network TV and comedic YouTube videos are fun, they can also be addicting like a sweet sugary snack. Consume too many of these snacks and you will soon find yourself gasping at the scale in disbelief. However, the rate and ease of access to these sugary information snacks has only increased in recent years.

We have been incredibly successful at increasing the number and variety of places where we can forage for information. The convergence of social networks, mobile devices, and real-time activity streams have led to an explosion in the amount of information we can suck in and spit back out. It’s like an ever-growing information buffet – and we’re there for the ‘all you can eat’ meal. At the same time, with an overload of information available to us, our tools for finding, consuming and filtering this information have remained constant in their ability to assist us in making sense of the data. The result is an increasingly complex information environment – one in which we must constantly work to filter the myriad points of data presented to us.

While observing an ant making a chaotic path along a sandy beach, Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner and a “father of artificial intelligence and attention economics” once noted:

“An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself” (Sciences of the Artificial, p 22).

Every day, our environment is becoming increasingly complex. As we continue to increase the number of people we follow and the number of feeds we consume, we are all increasing the complexity of our information diet. Some have even begun to label this as “infobesity.” Increasing the complexity and volume of information we ingest can have a similar effect to increasing your daily intake of calories.

Activity streams are quickly becoming a dominant form of information delivery on the web. These real-time, ever-flowing rivers of information epitomize the reasoning for being conscious of our information diet. Activity streams provide bite-sized information that is easy to snack on at any time, but it can be potent in calories due to the frequency of updates. In order to maintain a nutritious information diet, we will need tools and features that provide feedback on our consumption habits, as well as smart agents that help us optimize the amount of valuable information consumed per time expended.

Personally, I am eagerly awaiting the day when I discover an activity stream of information that comes complete with “Nutrition Facts” to assist me in making good choices. Not too far down the road, our information consumption will be guided by metrics that help each one of us determine the most valuable people and information sources, creating order in the chaos that has become modern information delivery.