Clay Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, answering the question, “Does going on an information diet improve one’s productivity?” on Quora:The concept of an information diet shouldn’t be to “shut away all information consumption and focus on doing work.” If you look at food — the most common place where we have the concept of “diet” we’d never say that a healthy diet is “temporarily not eating” — that’s either waiting between meals/snacks, fasting, or anorexia, but it’s not dieting. A healthy information diet means being selective about one’s information intake, and consciously consuming it.
Can an information diet that’s focused on creating healthy consumption of information improve one’s productivity? You bet — if anything, trying to cap your total daily information intake will increase your productivity by adding more time to your life. The average American spends 11 hours a day consuming information while they’re not at work and many of us who work in front of a computer end up spending a lot of time consuming information while at work, too. …
My information diet consists of a cap of 6 hours a day of total, proactive information consumption. That means everything that requires my explicit attention that doesn’t involve another person — television, movies, the Internet, email, social networks — if it involves a URL, a mouse, or a remote control, that goes into that 6 hours. It doesn’t mean anything physically social or stuff I have no control over, like advertisements on the subway, or music in the grocery store.
Of that six hours, I spend 2 hours on entertainment and 4 hours on work related research and communication. Sometimes that changes — on weekends, for instance, I spend the full six hours doing whatever the heck I want, as long as it’s not more than six hours. By capping it at six hours, it also forces me to do things like go for a long walk with my wife, or cooking a good dinner, or producing information. That’s been a heck of an improvement not only on my productivity, but in my marriage and on my overall health.
Manners also helped create the South’s famous “bless your heart” culture — a powerful way of seeming to be polite without being genuine.
Of the many absurdities perpetrated in the article, this may be the most egregious. Let me explain — no, it is too much, let me sum up.
It is not a matter of “seeing to be polite without being genuine,” it is a matter of being polite by refraining from being genuine. My “genuine” self, I am compelled to confess, is not lovely to behold. My friends and family members have to put up with it, at least to some extent, but it would be rude indeed for me to inflict it on you. Therefore I show my respect for you by putting on a mask of politeness and not exposing you to my feelings of the moment. I thereby imply that I would appreciate it if you reciprocated. Only an exceptionally naïve person would think that Southern politeness is sincere.
Any culture of politeness is based on the sober but accurate acknowledgement that “genuine” and “authentic” people tend to be a major pain in the neck. A genteel hypocrisy, therefore, greases the wheels of social life.
When Jimmy Carter was running for President, a journalist came to Plains, Georgia to interview his mother, the redoubtable Miss Lillian. After a few pleasantries he got down to work. He wanted to get her response to her son’s claim that he would never lie to the American people. Did she really believe that?
Miss Lillian replied that she did.
The reporter was highly dubious. He wondered whether it was possible that Jimmy had never lied at all.
Miss Lillian allowed that he might at some point have uttered “a little white lie,” but no more than that.
At this the reporter swooped in for the kill. A white lie? What makes something a white lie? How do you define a white lie, and distinguish it from some other kind?
“Well,” said Miss Lillian, “I don’t know whether I can define it, but I can give you an example.”
The reporter insisted that she do just that.
“All right,” she said. “Remember how, when you came to the door, I told you I was glad to see you?”
Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it’s even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well established collection of knowledge, competencies and processes, refined over time, practiced under forever difficult circumstances in a frankly indifferent market. Which is not to say that it’s exclusive: the bar to entry has dropped massively, obviously, in the last ten years. But it’s still hard, and hard to do well, and the rewards are still small. Writing something and putting it on the internet is not publishing. Producing an application and getting it into the app store is not publishing. If you think everyone is a publisher, go home now, and come back when you’ve thought about what you do.
Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they will tell you the next day that they have no recollection of the experience, that they have never seen this game before—and, most likely, that they have no idea who you are, either. But if you look at their performance on the game the next day, you’ll find that they have improved exactly as much as nonamnesiacs. Implicitly their brains have learned the game: The knowledge is simply not accessible to their consciousness. (Interestingly, if you wake up an amnesic patient during the night after he has played Tetris, he’ll report that he was dreaming of colorful falling blocks but will have no idea why.)
It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone. My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.
After six months, my editor finally wrote me. Not surprisingly, he no longer liked my book. Too complicated for the average trade reader. He advised me to speculate. “Unleash your inner Marshall McLuhan,” he said, and rewrite the book. This was excellent advice from a smart man with decades of experience in trade publishing. But I realized that I had no inner Marshall McLuhan. Even more important was my realization that I had no inner James Surowiecki, Malcolm Gladwell, or Chris Anderson. From my editor’s perspective, these were models, and rightly so. They made trade publishers a fortune. From my perspective, however, they were good writers who had spun big ideas into gold. I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong. Years of academic research taught me two things. First, reality is as complicated as it is, not as complicated as we want it to be. Some phenomena have an irreducible complexity that will defeat any big-idea effort at simplification. Detailed research has, not surprisingly, cast doubt on the reality of wise crowds, tipping points, and long tails. Second, most of the easy big questions about the way the world works have been answered. The questions that remain are really hard. Big ideas, then, can only reinvent the wheel or make magical claims.
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was illiterate. But Cutler is also misguided in calling him a “brilliant scholar.” His contemporaries certainly didn’t think of him that way. Ben Jonson felt he “wanted art,” i.e. lacked erudition; Francis Beaumont considered his best lines “clear” of “all learning.” And that view prevailed: later, John Milton praised Shakespeare’s “native wood-notes wild” – the opposite of scholarship.The notion that Shakespeare was extraordinarily erudite is a 20th-century fiction, an effect of historical distance. Even now, though, it is easy to identify a truly learned writer: just read Jonson. His Sejanus bursts with classical footnotes; the Venice of his Volpone, unlike Shakespeare’s, is pieced together from a meticulous study of authoritative sources; his scenes debating literary theory are incomprehensible to modern readers. (Jonson was a bricklayer’s son who hadn’t gone to university.)
Jonson’s learnedness, however, makes his works a hard sell nowadays. Unlike Cutler, I would identify Shakespeare’s very lack of erudition, his limitations, as the qualities that make his works enduringly powerful; his thoughts, and especially their expression, can be startlingly simple. Shakespeare’s language shows more familiarity with rural England than with any field of learning, although he clearly could reference the worlds of law, of alchemy, or of sports like hawking and tennis – he lived in London for most of his life, after all, cheek by jowl with courtiers, and performed for aristocratic audiences every year.
The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. The mainstream right will not challenge those who’ll exploit the system for their own ends, and exploit others for their own profit, because so many have off-loaded their moral thinking to the market. Nor, not in a million years, will the Republican Party. That may be one of the worst results of the sixties, that the politics of gesture and emotion have been privileged, as the academics put it, which means a politics with no actual political content will drive a publicly successful movement like Occupy Wall Street—even though it is not going anywhere in particular.
I agree with this analysis completely. I sympathize with, and feel, the anger behind #OWS, but with every day that passes the various acts of “occupation” seem emptier, more pointless. How do we get from these gestures to legitimate political action?
Twitter is all about slang and abbreviations, but it’s just not eroding the English language. In fact, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman found the exact opposite: It’s making it better.
Hey, hang on a minute, no he doesn’t. Liberman doesn’t in any way suggest that Twitter is making language better or worse. He just says that the claim that Twitter is causing us to use shorter words doesn’t seem to be borne out by the evidence. Let’s not replace unsubstantiated doom-&-gloom with unsubstantiated euphoria.