#informationdiet

[marandsviet]

Manna from Heaven or Junk Food? The Value of Information Online

Manna from Heaven or Junk Food? The Value of Information Online

  Manna from Heaven or Junk Food? The Value of Information Online The internet has transformed the way we access and consume information. Wi

[anton-chekhlenkov]

Hey, guys, I am ALIVE. Just gone missing from network radars as a result of drowning in flows of useful but redundant pack of knowledge I’ve never experienced before.

After 10 f*cking days, the shock from information flow has passed and I’ve developed the immunity to such volumes of data. Though it still remains to figure out what I need to learn myself and what should be properly delegated. Feel free to share your secret techniques of information detoxification and digital diet! Damn, this topic is so relevant, especially for us - millennials (the AutoCorrect suggests replacing it with «millionaires», but it’s not the time yet, just not the time yet)

Translated by Irina Zaitseva

[sickasiansanonymous-blog]

GOING LOW CONTACT: MY #BOUNDARIES WITH MY FAMILY. If you’ve read my last few posts, you know that I have a complicated relationship with my family. Since I want to continue having a relationship with them, I need to have clear boundaries especially around contact. In some cases, it’s appropriate to implement boundaries without talking about them with the other party. In my case, I had a lot of serious discussions with my family about my boundaries. These discussions were inevitably discarded after a few days, but they happened. In general, I am #LowContact with my family. For me, that means I see them only at occasions, I screen their calls via voicemail, and I don’t respond to their messages until I’m ready to. I block or restrict their accounts from seeing my social media. I don’t interact with them alone, because that’s when they try to pressure me the most. I use the #InformationDiet technique, which means I don’t share much about my life with them. I don’t talk about problems I’m having, my plans for the future, or changes I’m making. This means there’s less of my life for them to disbelieve, deny, and judge. The #InformationDiet has made the biggest difference in how bearable my interactions with them are. I am considering some other changes that may help me stay safe during those interactions, but I’m still trying to figure out how to implement them. Every so often they get agitated that I insist on maintaining these boundaries, and in doing so, remind me why I have them. What kind of boundaries do you have with your family? How does upholding your boundaries make you feel? #Asian #AsianDiaspora #AsianMentalHealth #Filipinx #Filipino #ChronicIllness #InvisibleIllness #Sick #SickGirlsClub #Spoonie #POCwME #Disabled #DisabledPOC #InvisibleDisability #DisabilityAdvocate #MedicalAbuse #Ableism #Crip #Trauma #ToxicPeople #ToxicFamily #IntergenerationalTrauma #ComplexPTSD #FamilyTrauma #Queer https://www.instagram.com/p/B8cBuGCArtq/?igshid=1n99nfeqj850t

[seeminglyrob]

In a media landscape of zip-fast reports as stripped of context as a potato might be stripped of fibre, most news stories fail to satiate. We don’t consume news all day because we’re hungry for information – we consume it because we’re hungry for connection. That’s the confusing conundrum for the 21st century heart and mind: to be at once over-informed and grasping for understanding.

Read everything Sarah Smarsh writes.

[marketingsceptics]

Thoughts on Today’s Speed of Marketing

Efficiency & speed have become almost self-sufficient values in our fast-paced marketing world of today. As part of this development, communication is changing to faster channels as brands are trying to communicate to consumers more and more in real-time. As part of this development, buzzwords like ‘hyper-relevance’ are indicating marketers’ ambition to tap into the needs of our here and now, delivering a stream of personalized offers to us by way of an algorithm-driven just-in-time supply for everything we hunger for at each given moment in our life.

As consumers, we have also grown into expecting more and more goods and services to be delivered to us instantly - so to speak ‘in a click’. With the increasing digitalisation of our consumption, we have learned that everything we want can be obtained by a mere twitch of our index finger. With the same speed we are consuming digital content faster and faster, tripping into an ever increasing spiral of minimally reflective interaction with a gargantuan flood of endless stimuli.

A frequent reflex and obviously incompatible coping mechanism of consumers for this overabundance of branded stimuli is to in turn increase the speed of consumption of goods as well as of the informational bow wave that today’s marketing is producing for them. In consequence this leads to a general strategy shift of the way today’s consumers are processing information: instead of keeping a clear focus of attention, consumers are now more and more conditioned to take up whatever bits and pieces of information they get thrown at in the digital and social channels they have subscribed to, quickly scan them for novelty and short-term instrumentality for their current goals. If a piece of information is neither new nor instrumental to reach their current goal, it is mentally dropped without further processing.

Biologically speaking, this strategic shift can be expressed with the simplified Verhulst model of population dynamics, which depicts the change of the population N to the current population size and expresses the effect of the two parameters r (growth rate) and K (carrying capacity). 

This model is supposed to mathematically describe the selective pressures that drive evolution either in the direction of an r- (high reproduction rate) or K- (high maintenance / quality) reproduction strategy.  

The analogy here is that the evolutionary forces for our (digital) behavior are currently clearly driving us towards an r-strategy of informational reproduction where we become quality-insensitive ‘content-ragpickers’ that are more and more conforming to the automated and fast paced production of over-recycled content-detritus that is delivered to us by branded entities that behave like social ‘spambots’.

Unfortunately, this development is not only completely unnecessary but also driven by a huge misunderstanding. Because r-strategies do only apply to unstable or unpredictable environments in which our (intellectual) offspring has only a very low probability of surviving to adulthood. While the metaphor of “digital darwinism” is implying that this is in fact the case, its application to our very own intellectual activity in the digital sphere is misinterpreting the critical substrate in question when it comes to the correct understanding of the digital ecosphere. Harvard’s David Weinberger has correctly stated that “the internet is not the medium: WE are the medium.”

So by lowering our own quality thresholds of communicative interaction - assumedly in face of the increasing terror of the ever-increasing pace of automated low-quality content - we have effectively lost sight of the much more important fact that the actual informational battle is not being fought against the seemingly endless information-technologies of Facebook, Google & Co. but only against our own intellectual capabilities and our willingness to drop our quality standards of digitally shared thoughts and conversations. In that light, we are dealing with a highly limited resource - clear, precise and original thinking - which is worth all the effort in the world when it comes to the question of whether or not to invest some more time in an original thought of yours.

Therefore, this blog-post is - in remembrance of the cluetrain manifesto - meant as a digital manifesto in favor of applying and upholding our quality standards of digital communication, of actively and consciously choosing an informational K- over the always impending r-strategy. Don’t succumb to the menace of social spambots, don’t become a bot. Stay human, even in the face of an inhuman marketing. Thank you @dweinberger, @RealJaronLanier! If you need some time to think ‘outside the box’, go detox, put yourself on an informational diet. Don't just 'consume & reproduce' information, think!

[michellelsun]

Rethinking Our Diet

So, Google reader is closing down. It feels as if a familiar restaurant in the neighborhood is going out of business, one that I have grown to like and frequent for convenience. I am one of those people that likes to go the same restaurant around my neighborhood and orders the same food that I know I like. When a restaurant closes, it abruptly ends the cycle and it is uncomfortable. On the bright side, it presents a chance to reconsider a habit, rethink my diet. 

There are three types of readers that have been feeding my information diet. A few years ago when I started following tech blogs, I relied on Google Reader, a "source-based reader" and subscribed to a long list of blogs, such as Techcrunch, Fred Wilson etc. 

Later, the rise of social readers, such as Twitter or Facebook feed, provided a new, relevant set of articles endorsed by my personal and professional contacts. 

Then since late last year, I started using topic-based readers. Prismatic, which algorithmically recommends articles based on my viewing history, has allowed me to discover new sources of interesting articles that my friends, or my existing list of subscribed blogs did not cover. Quora and Quibb, which present an interesting mix of topical and social link-sharing and discussion, also have became an growing part of my diet.  

In an age where we are bombarded with information, Clay Johnson, author of Information Diet, pointed out an interesting statistic at his presentation at SXSW (his slides embedded below). Online media sites that take a more polarized view have been attracting more audience than those that present a balanced stance. Given a main business model on advertising, these sites in pursuit of more viewership, are becoming even more opinionated. 

We as consumers of information, sometimes read to seek affirmation rather than the truth. This, combined with the economic force of driving advertising revenue, is leading to a polarized landscape in media. Hence, Clay believes that, consumption of information can sometimes lead us to be more close-minded rather than more informed. 

I am not sure the solution to this, but this is an alarming thought to me.

One thing I'm seeking to do more, is to read from individual bloggers, balancing my intake of information from large, advertising-driven media businesses. Without the motive of winning advertising dollars, non-advertising driven content can be considered as the "organic food" of our information diet. Seek out and share articles or blog posts written by people that are presenting opposing views. Welcome differing views, and challenge the loud, mainstream voices with their assumptions. 

On the same thread, I believe encouraging more people to participate in the dialogue would also help. Blogging is not only a great way to build an audience and share a viewpoint, but more importantly, becoming a creator of content has allowed me to be more conscious of what I consume. Getting into a habit of creating helps also to shift time from consuming to creating. And every small step counts. When it comes to consumption, perhaps less is more. 

It'd also be cool to have a tool that analyzes and reports the weekly information diet, something akin to RescueTime but for browsing history. Just like going on a real diet, the first and most effective step is to know what we eat. 

As Google Reader closes, I want to take this opportunity to rethink my information diet, and strive to become a more conscious consumer of information. 

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How is your information diet like? Are you aware of what you consume as information? I'm curious to hear about it in the comments! 

Clay Johnson's Information Diet Slides from SXSW from Clay Johnson

  Photo Credit: Stadshem