The Information Diet Part 11

Political Infoveganism.

The rule at most dinner parties is that there are three things you don't discuss: sports, religion, and politics. I can understand the first two-no sporting event is useful without an intense rivalry, one that's built intentionally to cross the wall of logic and rational behavior and into something more akin to faux-tribal loyalties. And religion is a deeply personal belief that's usually nonpliable. It's likely too difficult to get a Muslim and a Christian to agree on the stature of Jesus Christ or Muhammed.

Politics are different. The greatest political ideas have come from the constant search for synthesis and pragmatism, and the foundation of democracy is constant public partic.i.p.ation. Policy is something we should talk about at the dinner table; it's vital to our civic health that we do. Democracy cannot survive without the synthesis of ideas from its citizens.

Yet the reason we don't is because we risk relationships when we do. It is because of the fear of the Uncle Warren situation: that the conversation will devolve from ideas to attacks, name-calling, and finally to division. It's not worth the risk. Bringing up politics always ends up with alienation.

The source of our problem with political dialog has its roots in our information diets. Frequently, mainstream national political news is worthless-at best it glosses over the issues that governments are trying to deal with, and at worst represents sensationalized opinion. From Dylan Ratigan to Bill O'Reilly to Wolf Blitzer, paid political operatives and pundits gloss over the facts in order to keep you watching. As someone who has worked inside D.C.'s machinery for a decade, I have learned that the media cla.s.s around the United States Federal Government and national news has little interest in providing you with the public service of informing you. They are interested in selling advertis.e.m.e.nts.

Our political information diets are the worst of them all-they're misinformed, they offer little to no knowledge about the actual procedures of Washington, and deliver to us the news we want to hear, not the news we should hear. As a result, we grow more attached to the teams of our choosing-the reds vs. the blues, rather than finding the great synthesis of ideas.

Political news does us no good unless it is potentially actionable via our votes or our activism. To make sense of politics, we need to delve underneath what our news outlets are telling us and into the data that makes politics tick. Thanks to the work of organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics, the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation, and my former employer the Sunlight Foundation, we can start having a direct relationship with what's really happening in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

A healthy information diet always starts locally-and your political information should be no different. The goings-on of your state representatives and city and county governments, along with your school boards and other local government offices are the best, healthiest forms of content for political news, and should be consumed over the national or global news.

OpenGovernment.org, a project of the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, is attempting to build user-friendly websites that allow you to see every vote cast on every bill by every elected state representative and senator in every state. It's a huge undertaking, and if you're in one of the states they're covering, then you can take advantage of a great user interface and user-focused thought that goes into the project.

At the local level, the National Inst.i.tute for Money in State Politics tracks non-federal races: your governors and state representatives. With its website followthemoney.org, you can type in the name of a politician and see who is funding his campaign. At the federal level, the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org does the same thing.

At the federal level, OpenCongress.org, also a project of the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation, gives you unprecedented access to what's going on in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Just like OpenGovernment.org, you can find your politicians, look up their votes on bills, and even contact them to tell them how you feel about issues.

To see what influences our politicians, it's good to take a look at the industries and donors giving to their campaigns. While the connection between money and politics isn't direct and uniform, money at the very least buys access, and at its worst buys votes. In either case, it is good to take a look at what kinds of people you're a.s.sociating with by supporting a particular candidate or campaign.

On television, C-SPAN does a better service of covering the news than FOX, MSNBC, or the major networks. It provides an advertis.e.m.e.nt and a.n.a.lysis free way for you to see what's going on and to see what candidates are saying directly.

For activists, it may seem nice to subscribe to political emails too, to get the latest on the campaigns and issues that you support, but most of the time, these too quickly turn into advertis.e.m.e.nts. Sign up to get updates from Newt Gingrich, for instance, through HumanEvents.com, and you'll soon start getting emails asking you to buy gold, advertisments for books to read, and recommendations on penny stocks.

Finally, to keep your inbox from filling up with political advertis.e.m.e.nts, avoid signing pet.i.tions and signing up for regular campaign updates. As a cofounder of one of the larger firms on the left responsible for the drafting of these pet.i.tions and the software that runs it, I can a.s.sure you that the online pet.i.tions that you sign are not meant, primarily, to cause change. They're meant to get your email address so that you can later be bombarded by emails asking for money.

Instead, keep your voice your own, and if there's an issue that you care about, bypa.s.s the middlemen and speak directly to your representative through the official means given to you-via house.gov, senate.gov, or whitehouse.gov. Or if you want to be truly effective, meet with your representatives in person. Call their offices, ask to speak to their schedulers, and get yourself a meeting.

With business news, paying attention to your local businesses, reading the public filings of companies from the SEC is likely to give you more benefit than listening to Jim Cramer smash things on CNBC.

In sports, developing a mastery of the statistics we use to measure the performance of our athletes may provide you with more insight and more pleasure for the game than listening to the washed up pundits and armchair quarterbacks tell you what they think. And certainly watching the games themselves is far more important to understanding the game than listening to the pundits prattle on about it.

It turns out the more local your sports diet, the more rewarding it can be too. Although watching a local high school baseball game doesn't often give us the athletic showmanship of professional sports, it trades that for being able to watch kids play for the sport of the game, rather than for the money.

The same can be said for any major section of your newspaper, or any topic you're interested in. The pattern here is simple: seek to get information directly from sources, and when the information requires you to act, interact directly with those sources. An over-reliance on third party sources for information and action reduces your ability to know the truth about what's happening, and dilutes your ability to cause change.

The thing that's made what Alexis de Tocqueville called "The Great American Experiment," as on page 135, work is our ability to be pragmatic. Unfortunately, the economics of our information production, and what we're willing to consume, is destroying our very ability to be pragmatic-to look to solve solvable problems. We get caught up in big debates, and brush off the boring stuff for the wonks to deal with.

Going on a healthy information diet restores our ability to be pragmatic. Let's take our country back, not from the right or from the left, but from the crazy partisanship of both sides. Let's give it to the stewards that have made the country so great, the pragmatists-the ones who want to create a more perfect union. A country with measurable results and demonstrably good outcomes.

Without stealing too much from President Obama, I'd like to suggest that we are the wonks we've been waiting for.

Appendix A. A Special Note: Dear Programmer.

"It circulates intelligence of a commercial, political, intellectual, and private nature, with incredible speed and regularity. It thus administers, in a very high degree, to the comfort, the interests, and the necessities of persons, in every rank and station of life. It brings the most distant places and persons, as it were, in contact with each other; and thus softens the anxieties, increases the enjoyments, and cheers the solitude of millions of hearts."

-Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1833 on the United States Post Office [93]

Six thousand years ago, there was a professional cla.s.s of people that had a better relationship with information than everybody else. The professional scribe, armed with the ability to read and write, had a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else. Scribes became more than just stenographers for the courtrooms of power; they explored the sciences, becoming mathematicians, scientists, architects, and physicians. For millennia, the scribe wasn't just a professional cla.s.s, it was the backbone of civilization.

Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe cla.s.s became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn't a trade secret for a professional cla.s.s-it was a necessary a.s.set for economic survival. Scribes went extinct, and were replaced in society by journalists, who had marginally better abilities to read and write, to preserve the link between the people and the truth.

But our romantic idea of the journalist speaking truth to power has now gone all but extinct. As our media companies have consolidated and sought shareholder returns over civic responsibility, there's not much left for the investigative reporter; local newspapers just don't have the budget for investigative reporting, and larger media companies are making too much money peddling affirmation over information.

The invention of the printing press brought with it the Protestant Reformation-a democratization of the people's relationship with G.o.d. Once the Bible could be purchased by the middle cla.s.s, every man, in the eyes of Martin Luther, could become his own priest. Today, the invention of the Internet has democratized information such that professional journalists alone cannot own the relationship with the facts anymore.

Today, programmers are the new scribes. Whether it is the developers at Google, determining which search results are accurate for a particular query; the developers at Microsoft, building the browser that most of us use; the developers at Apple, building the latest phones so that we can have a printing press in our pockets; or the developers at Facebook, figuring out which of our friends are the most relevant to us-the developers build the lenses that the rest of us look through to get our information.

This book's agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into the things that matter most and to tune out the things that make them sick. The ones who can link the public with the truth most effectively today aren't journalists, they're developers. As the digital divide continues to close, and as a generation of children grows up knowing how to use an iPad from the age of two, developers must take the mantle of scribe seriously and responsibly.

The opportunities for developers to make a difference are unparalleled. The self-driving cars being engineered at companies like Volkswagen and Google aren't just novel inventions that allow us to watch movies on our way to work; they're life-saving devices. The self-driving car promises a future in which drunk driving deaths no longer happen.

The World Bank has opened most of its data to the public, hoping that developers can find more effective ways for the organization to distribute financial and medicinal aid to developing nations.

Code for America is creating an army of developers to create technology that helps the government provide cheaper, more transparent, and more reliable services. In its first year, it managed to create new ways for civic leaders to work with one another in Philadelphia and Seattle, and provided more educational transparency to the city of Boston. Through its Civic Commons project, it's helping munic.i.p.alities work together to lower the costs of the software they procure by connecting the cities together to share.

Just after the devastating earthquakes in 2010, I hosted a "Hack for Haiti" event at the Sunlight Foundation. In just 48 hours, a small group of developers at a company in Washington called Intredia developed software that allowed relief workers on the ground to translate Creole into English without the need for an Internet connection.

Most developers haven't taken this new responsibility to heart. A half-century ago, the brightest minds of the generation were working on putting a man on the moon. Today, the 20-something research scientist and data team lead for Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher, put it best: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."[94]

If you're a developer, you can do more than this: you can solve problems. With the right data, and working with the right people, you can find efficient ways to connect vaccines with the people who need them the most, and prevent them from being wasted on the people who need them the least. You can find ways to close the gap between the reality-based community, and the folks stuck in epistemic loops, by linking them more closely to the levers of power in their community.

My plea to you is that you take your role in society seriously. Find an issue you care about: the environment, cancer, s.p.a.ce exploration, education, rewiring communities, pet adoption-anything-and dedicate some portion of your time to finding new ways to put your skills to use in that community.

You needn't ask for permission to do this. Do not wait for a nonprofit or advocacy group to ask you donate your time. While it's useful to partner with organizations, it's likely that they're more interested in your skills to help them fundraise than they are to solve problems. Instead, find ways to interview and understand experts in the field, and then invent new ways to solve problems big and small. The best ideas do not rely on a government's or organization's permission or compliance for implementation. The best ideas provide irrefutable insight and solve problems.

The lean startup world that many technology-focused people find themselves in usually starts with a business-oriented cofounder, and a technology-oriented cofounder. To make an interesting social contribution, try partnering up with a journalist. Cynicism aside, there are still a few good reporters working in the world, who know how to ask the right questions and get the most out of the data that you can process.

There are networks of journalists looking for developers across the country. Check out the organization Hacks/Hackers, which is attempting to do just that: link great developers with great investigative reporters to combine the best of both worlds. Watch the work of the Knight Foundation, too. They're investing millions of dollars in reinventing media for the digital age.

Keep in mind that this isn't a call for you to build apps for your favorite nonprofit. Unless you're willing to support and maintain each application, and help constantly ensure its usage and adoption, you're wasting your time. Your nonprofit likely doesn't have the kind of resources or knowledge it takes to ensure success. Rather, it's a call for you to solve problems using your skills.

Doctors Without Borders works because doctors can triage the ill, and put them on a course to getting better. They're solving immediate problems, and when they leave, the doctors know they made a difference. A programmer's relationship to her product is different: it takes time and maintenance to have the desired effect.

My other plea to you is that you take your role in society responsibly. Just as responsible journalists have a code of ethics, so should you. It should never be your goal to a.n.a.lyze data to make a point, but rather to a.n.a.lyze it to tell the truth. As we've discovered in this book, we all come with our own biases-some we don't even know we have. But you must try as hard as you can to not let your own agenda supersede the truth.

The CEO of my publisher, O'Reilly Media, Tim O'Reilly, has a guiding principle that I think applies here: work on stuff that matters. Please, don't let your entire career be about figuring out new ways to deliver advertis.e.m.e.nts. Even if it pays the bills, find an additional outlet to use your skills to make a difference.

The greatest scribes have always done so, whether it was Imhotep and the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser, Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, or Google's self-driving car, our information technology is powerful stuff. You can do amazing things if you, as O'Reilly says, take the long view, and create more value than you capture.

You can even run for Congress. While many sneer at the idea of the nerdy caricatures of developers that they know, the fact is that software engineers are often great communicators. And while cynical developers may be repulsed at the idea of working for such an organization, there's so much value they can add.

Developers are great at using technology to connect directly with people in ways that others cannot, and at helping const.i.tuents connect with one another. With a developer who understands the guts of the Web in a leadership spot inside Congress, Congress could start communicating more effectively online. And as this developer became more successful, the rest of Congress may very well follow suit.

The government's problems are becoming increasingly technical-or the problems we're facing have technology tied to them in some way. For instance, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 isn't just a 1000+ page bill that's now a law, it's also a technical specification for Recovery.gov-and it's written by people who don't know how to write specifications. Worse, unlike a poorly informed client or boss, if you don't adhere to this client's wishes, you don't just lose money-you may be breaking the law. Thus, Recovery.gov was built to spec, but hasn't been particularly effective at bringing people into the process.

It's every crooked consultant's dream to have a client who views what they sell as a form of mysticism, and that's precisely what's happening around our munc.i.p.al, state, and federal governments. A few developers in Congress could reign in the spending and help their peer representatives appropriate taxpayer funds. Today, there is exactly one developer who has written software professionally who has also been elected to Congress: Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisana. If a revitalization of government technology is going to happen smartly and wisely, we need some developers inside Congress to help lead the way.

Of course, you don't have to (and probably shouldn't) start in federal politics. Join your local civic a.s.sociation first, and find new ways to help your local community. You'll discover plenty of opportunity and many open arms there. But again, don't wait for someone's permission, unless it absolutely requires their adoption and sponsorship in order to work.

Finally, for those of you who aren't engineers, know that the most vital thing after basic literacy for the education of yourself and your children is digital literacy and STEM education: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. History shows us that perhaps a century from now saying "I'm not an Internet person" may be much like saying "I don't know how to read." Organizations like CodeNow are helping transform our concepts of literacy by making sure computer science education is accessible to everyone who wants it, and is constantly looking for volunteer engineers who can help teach cla.s.ses. While it's not the key to solving all of our problems and differences, those skills, combined with the ability to communicate, give us the greatest ability to see the truth.

[93] Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Const.i.tution 3: 111942, 114445.

[94] http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/why-this-tech-bubble-is-different-20110415-1dhbm.html#ixzz1YEPeAxNW.

Appendix B. Further Reading.

People.

The concept of an information diet is a relatively new one, and the thoughts and ideas in this book come from research and interviews with scores of people. In addition to pointing you towards the research papers and books I've read and recommend to further your study, it's also important to follow the people who are leading this field, who are studying how the mind works, the economics of information, and the ever-changing face of our news media.

As much of our scientific research still sits behind paywalls, interacting directly with the scientists who use social media has an added payoff: you'll gain exposure to their work without having to subscribe to the various scientific publication services. In the spirit of infoveganism, I advise you to connect directly with these researchers and scientists.

Matt Cutts Matt Cutts is the head of the web-spam team at Google, the person with the job of managing Panda, and maintaining Google's delicate search relationship with content farms. He's been called "Google's Greenspan."

http://twitter.com/mattcutts http://mattcutts.com Marco Iacaboni Dr. Iacaboni's insight on the consequences of neuroplasticity and how we affect each other is tremendously important to follow.

http://twitter.com/marcoiacoboni http://iacoboni.bmap.ucla.edu/ Ryota Kanai Dr. Kanai's research links our brain's structure to our political affiliations. His continued interests are around our perception of time, the neuroscience behind our attention, and distractibility.

http://twitter.com/kanair http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Research-Groups/awareness-group/group-members/MemberDetails.php?t.i.tle=Dr&FirstName=Ryota&LastName=Kanai Brendan Nyhan Dr. Nyhan's work on measuring the effectiveness of messaging on the public and the outcomes of our information consumption is leading the field. Read his papers and engage with him online. He's responsive and smart.

http://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan http://www.brendan-nyhan.com Robert Proctor Robert Proctor invented the term agnotology, and was the inspiration for Chapter 7.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/proctor.html Julian Sanchez Julian Sanchez is the person who brought the idea of epistemic closure into the modern political dialog. He's a writer for Reason magazine and the CATO inst.i.tute.

http://twitter.com/normative Linda Stone Linda Stone's research on conscious computing, email apnea, and our attention spans is amazing to watch. Follow her work at: https://twitter.com/LindaStone http://lindastone.net John Tierney John Tierney is a science columnist for the New York Times and, along with Roy Baumeister, is the author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

http://twitter.com/JohnTierneyNYT http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/columns/johntierney/index.html Jeff Jarvis Jeff Jarvis is an a.s.sociate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York's Gradute School of Journalism. While he's not directly quoted in this book, his thought leadership around the field of journalism is worth paying attention to.

http://twitter.com/JeffJarvis http://buzzmachine.com Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor teaches digital media entrepreneurship and is founding director of the Knight Center on Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Ma.s.s Communication. His work is trying to make sense of the new fields of journalism and how the digital industrialization of it can yield new business models.

http://twitter.com/dangillmor http://dangillmor.com Jim Gilliam Jim Gilliam is the consummate civic hacker, using his skills to try and connect people to each other and to the levers of power in their local communities. He's the founder of 3dna, a startup in California that builds tools to shake up a political system, most recently NationBuilder, an affordable tool that allows people to organize effectively.

http://twitter.com/jgilliam http://3dna.us/blog And of course, me My hope is that this book isn't the end of something, but the start of something: an exploration into how our information affects our health. I certainly have not provided all the answers in this book, and there's still so much more work to be done. Please, be in touch.

You can find me on Google+ at: http://gplus.to/cjoh I use Google+ to have discussions with people about the topics of this book, and to do the occasional video chat with people interested in the field. Please stop by and interact with me.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjoh I tend to use Twitter to broadcast my latest writing, and to share simple links about the field of information dieting, government data, and activism.

Books.

Behind this book lies scores of others, and I've drawn from the research of many others to write this one. If you'd like to pursue studying in this field, I recommend the following: Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Harper Perennial, 2010.

Baumeister, Roy F., and John Tierney. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin Press, 2011.

Brown, Stuart, M.D., and Christopher Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Avery, 2009.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.

Hurley, Matthew M., Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams Jr. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. MIT Press, 2011.

Manjoo, Farhad. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Wiley, 2008.

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press, 2009.

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. Penguin Press, 2011.

Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Touchstone Books, 2001.

Scully, Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. St. Martin's Griffin, 2003.

Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. Penguin Press, 2011.

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Anchor, 1996.

Tavris, Caroll, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Mariner Books, 2008.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press, 2009.