Have you come across folks carrying an iPad or a smartphone and “reading” the news or simply browsing, but not reading, a huge number of publications? Not to mention the proud feeling of just being the owners of one (or more) of these extraordinary gadgets? Well, whether you are carring a tablet or a laptop computer, or sitting at home or office in front of an Internet browser, that will undoubtedly put a humongous amount of information (and misinformation) readily available to you in an instant. However, that does not change the fact that you still have to read it and digest it. The whole process has not changed, but “Information overconsumption” is what permeates our society. You still need to have good “information habits” in your “information diet” in order to avoid getting Information Obesity, and the goal of the author, Clay A. Johnson, is to show you how, whether you are a “liberal” or a “conservative”. Johnson, a former transparency advocate in Washington D.C., draws a clever parallel between our food consumption and our information consumption (hence, for instance, the theme of the book cover), and he believes that this is just not a fancy metaphor but a harsh reality and that a “conscious consumption of information is possible”, lest more and more proofs of information indigestion keep cropping up in the media, like that oxymoronic protest sign that read: Keep your government hands off my Medicare. Learn more about the incongruences that even people considered intelligent and educated utter in public more often than not, as just one of the many symptoms of this modern epidemic.

The information diet: a case for conscious consumption. Clay A. Johnson. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2012. First edition, second release.