Eating Manners for the Fast Food Age of Information Consumption

Originally published on Telefonica Advanced Data Analytics (German).

In the age of ‘big data’, we are no longer hunter-gatherers of information: we have become the hunted of the information industry. Learning from our eating manners can help us to achieve a healthier style of information consumption, and to not end up on the plate ourselves.

Often, we consume information like fast food.

Regarding their histories, food and information bear surprising resemblances. In ancient times, food was a scarce resource and often hard to obtain: we had to leave our caves, kill an animal or pick a plant, often without knowing whether it could be eaten or whether it was toxic. Then, agriculture turned food into a commodity; industrialisation followed and — approximately in the 1990s — we ended up in the ‘fast food age’.

When comparing this development to how our culture of information consumption has developed, the resemblances of food and information become apparent: information, as well, was hard to obtain for thousands of years. But over the course of history, several inventions made information increasingly cheap, fast and ubiquitous: The printing press, the telephone, the fax machine, the internet and, last but not least, the smart phone. Did we end up in the ‘fast food age’ of information consumption?

Since the 1990s, fast food has been available in many places. It often looks really tempting on the advertisement: juicy meat and fresh salad within a crispy bread roll. This positive impression is, unfortunately, short-lived. After a few bites, a feeling of discomfiture arises, together with uncomfortable questions: ‘Is this really what I hoped for? Is this really good for me?’

This is very similar to how we consume information. Through the smart phone, information has become available anywhere, any time. It is tempting to activate our phone over and over again, just for a quick check. This, of course, shouldn’t be held against us, because theoretically, it is possible that something really important has happened in the meantime, and that we’re not informed yet. Though, scrolling down our social media timelines, the same question often arises: ‘Is this really what I hoped for? Is this really good for me?’

The feeling of satiety after eating a burger is often not very long-lasting — just like the feeling of informedness after checking one’s phone. How long does it usually take until you reach out for your phone again?

If there is a parallel between food culture and our culture of information consumption, what can we learn from our food culture, in order to develop a healthier style of information consumption?

After all, this might not be easy: ‘snacking’ information can easily turn out to be only a mirage — an illusionary comfort zone, within the dry desert of our daily routines. But that’s easy to forget.

Attention, please.

The most scarce resource of our society is neither time nor money, it is attention. Attention what everyone demands of us, and what we demand from others. However, we have increasingly less attention to give: we are collectively creating a vacuum of attention. It is also comparable to a black hole: the more kitten videos and holiday pictures are uploaded into this black hole, the stronger its attraction becomes; the more difficult it is to withstand it — or even to stand out as an individual. Attraction and distraction are the same thing — only viewed from two different vantage points.

The problematic nature of how we consume information gets even clearer in situations of boredom. This is easily observable people on the bus or on the metro, looking at their phones. If you take a close look, you can often notice a fascinating pattern: they’re moving in circles. Like a tiger in a cage, they move from social media to email, to news, and back to social media: hoping for something interesting to occur.

Are we losing our ability to be bored and lonely? Moments of boredom and loneliness are, of course, often unpleasant. But nonetheless, they are important for us. We need these moments to spend time with ourselves, to reflect, and to develop ourselves further. Also, boredom is important for creativity. A well-known example for this is the effect of boredom on being stuck solving a crosswords puzzle: when not thinking about anything particular, the solution often appears by itself.

Somehow, we have changed from being the hunter-gatherers of information to the hunted of the information economy. Clay Johnson impressively describes in his book ‘The Information Diet’ how information, which has been of evolutionary advantage ages ago, is used today to catch our attention: information that causes fear, and information that satisfies our desire for confirmation.

Can we overconsume information? If we are in the fast-food age of information consumption, is there also a pendant of obesity? Information adiposity? Some people seem to have gathered a massive amount of rather useless knowledge (knowing the latest internet meme, etc.). Should we consider this to be a waste of time? Not necessarily, as Jaron Lanier writes in his book ‘You are not a gadget’: it’s the kitten videos that keep the web alive, until we really need it (e. g. as in the Arab spring).

Reclaiming Sovereignty

The algorithm is on our tail. The more we consume, the better it can estimate what would be of interest for us next. Information is power, especially in the age of ‘big data’.

‘Big data’ can help us to see patterns that we were unable to see before. As every new technology, also ‘big data’ will challenge us to find an ethical way of using it — it must not become synonymous for ‘big surveillance’ and ‘big manipulation’. It is well thinkable that every step I make and every piece of chocolate I eat has an effect on how much my health insurance costs me, and that every saccade movement in front of a shopping window will sharpen my ‘interest profile’, which retailers can use to alter prices and advertisements (for helping me to consume ‘optimally’). That is why it is important for us to maintain sovereignty over our own data, and to understand how it can be used: for us and against us.

This sovereignty includes also accountability. Just as we do not allow our children to make every decision on their own, we also do not hold our children fully responsible for their mistakes. Being mature includes both: being able to decide, but also being held accountable for the consequences. This maturity can be applicable also in the digital world: regarding data that we make publicly available about ourselves, but also regarding how we consume information.

Learning from Food Culture

What can we, concretely, learn from our food culture, in order to make our information consumption healthier? Let’s take a look at the different aspects of eating: Why do we eat? How do we get food? How do we consume it?

Why do we eat?

Well, first of all, because we have to — our body needs energy, and eating is the primary way of gaining this energy. But, at the same time, there are also other reasons for which people eat: social reasons, like a date or a business lunch, but also for psychological, compensatory reasons. Many people eat because they are bored or frustrated.

What can we learn for our information consumption? First of all, we can note that there is (in most cases) no physiological need to consume information (especially in the case of social media). Many reasons for which we consume information are social (e. g. so we can take part in the conversation) or compensatory: frustration, boredom, loneliness. We should be aware that it is our own choice whether and which information we consume.

How do we get food?

We have different options of obtaining food, and we can transfer them to our culture of information consumption. Theoretically, it would be possible to buy fresh fruits, vegetables and meat at the local market every day and thereby ‘close to the source’. This would be a good thing, but for many people, it isn’t feasible in everyday life: it’s a lot of work. The other extreme — fast food — is not feasible, as well: it is unhealthy. Our culture has developed a compromise between these two extremes: the supermarket — fresh food, little effort. And often a list of ingredients helps us to choose consciously what we consume.

What can we learn for our culture of information consumption here? It’s our choice how ‘close to the source’ we want to consume information: Do we want to consume ‘industrially preprocessed’ bites, which may, at best, be sufficient for a little ‘information snack’, or do we want to get closer to the source, perhaps even by reading two long articles about the same topic, comparing the two vantage points ourselves? Just like with food: it’s on us to ask where what we consume comes from. It’s on us to ask what’s inside what we consume. And it’s on us to estimate how what we consume will affect us. Can we be trusted judging ourselves what is good for us? Such transparency should, of course, be also available for the information collected about us, and the derivatives made out of it. After all, this information helps to build a model that resembles our preferences, which make it possible to cook our very personal, favourite information dish — just like we love it so much…

How do we consume food?

How much attention do we invest into eating? Also here, we can observe a broad spectrum of options. On the one side, we can decide to simply stuff ourselves with sugar and fat while watching TV, or to simply snack on the go. In these cases, the food itself does not get much attention: we focus on something else. But when cooking with friends, or when visiting a new restaurant (perhaps even a new kind of restaurant) for the first time, experiencing the food takes center stage. A similar choice can be made when consuming information: It’s on us to decide whether we want to consume information while doing something else — or to focus on it, taking time for it, and avoiding distractions (like, for example, when going to the cinema, or watching an ‘important’ sports event).

Establishing a healthier information diet

Everybody who has tried to diet once in his life knows that the problem is not the food, but the problem is us, ourselves. The same is true for information consumption. Something inside of us tells us that we should take out our phone at the store checkout, while waiting in line, just to fill the 20 seconds of doing nothing. What can we do when we are our own enemy?

A possible solution is viewing boredom differently. One helpful interpretation of boredom is that it is one’s inability to interact meaningfully with the environment. If we can change our own perception of the environment, we can turn boredom into something positive, an instrument of creativity. For that, our mind needs something to ‘chew on’, a question or thought, similar to a chewing gum. Ideal for this are those questions that keep us busy anyway (and awake at night). A tough question from work, an idea for a project, or an especially clever birthday gift for a loved one. Few things feel better than having a good idea, and the world is full of inspiration for good ideas.

But how can we integrate all of this into our everyday lives? I have tried a few things:

• I deactivated the browser on my phone. I can’t delete it, but I disabled it through the parental control settings. When I’m feeling urged to briefly check what’s new on the web (to fill those 20 seconds of emptiness at the store checkout), that is very cumbersome: Settings, parental settings, password, activate browser, … and afterwards, I have to set everything back!
• I don’t do mobile email since two years. All of my email, I read and write on my desktop PC. I never missed out on something. All my emails are still in my inbox after 5pm (which is my personal email time) — who would have thought that?
• I use my phone primarily to store thoughts. Note-taking software, the camera — all of this helps me to capture ideas and to look at them again later.
• My wife Sarah and I store our phones at night in the living room — not beside our beds. We even bought analog radio alarm clocks, which have never let us down. It’s much nicer to start the day with coffee, and not with information fast food.
• During our last three holidays, we have left our smart phones at home. We bought a cheap emergency phone with a prepaid SIM card, which’s number nobody has. We simply can’t be reached. Our holidays have, despite the absence of digital maps, restaurant ratings and translation software, much benefited from this: we were, without interruptions, just the two of us. We felt miserable for the poor people in the (obviously WiFi-dispensing) hotel lobby, checking the same Facebook they would check at home.

I’m trying, to pick up the food metaphor again, to change the contents of my ‘information fridge’. Less fast food, more material for creative cooking. Because creativity is in our nature — and self-cooked tastes way better than pre-chewed.