The Information Diet by Clay A. Johnson

Author:Clay A. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781449321550
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2011-12-06T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7. Data Literacy

“To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you’re going to write, you have to find out what’s bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what’s good for you.”

—Ernest Hemingway[76]

Our concept of literacy changes every time there’s a major shift in information technology. Being literate used to mean knowing how to sign your name. At one point it meant the ability to read and write Latin. Today, being literate generally means being able to read and understand a newspaper in your own language.

There has always been some group of people with a closer link to the truth than the rest of society. At one point in our history, some of our ancestors had the capacity for language, and some didn’t. When writing was developed, we had scribes. When the printing press was developed, the author, printer, and publisher became the new gatekeepers. After we taught everyone to read a newspaper, the journalists became the class closest to truth.

Now the problem is not a widespread inability to read and write, but the vast sea of textual, audio, and video data that we wade in every day. A new skill is necessary—one that helps filter and sort through this information.

Remember the trophic pyramid? It turns out that as energy makes its way up the food chain, its transfer gets less efficient. Consumers at each level of the pyramid convert only about 10% of the chemical energy from the step below them on the food chain. The further up the chain you go, the less energy you get.

This is why we don’t usually eat a lot of other carnivores—we tend to eat either plants or things that eat mostly plants (like cows, chickens, and pigs), but we don’t tend to eat things that eat cows, chickens, or pigs (like coyotes, lions, or hawks). Agriculture can’t sustain the cost it would take to transfer that kind of energy up the food chain for all of us.

In the world of information, there’s a kind of trophic pyramid, too; just swap energy for truth. The further away from the source—the more secondhand or thirdhand operators there are—the less truth there is.

We learn this when we’re children. We’ve all played a game of “operator” or “telephone,” wherein one person whispers a message such as “I like chocolate” into the ear of the child next to them, who then repeats the received phrase to the next child. The message is whispered on and on between all the participants, filtered through satirists and bullies, until it comes out the other end: “Clay eats worms.”

All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we’re getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells.

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