Feasting on junk info

There is a new kind of ignorance afoot in the world, one that results from overconsumption of information rather than from a lack of access to it.

It's fashionable to blame cable television and the Internet for this new ignorance. And it's true that if you spend much time watching cable news and surfing the Internet, you'll come away thinking that many information providers are more interested in fanning fear and feeding people's preconceived notions than they are at communicating truth.

But we should really blame ourselves for the content we're seeing. Why? Because what shows up on the Internet and cable television is shaped by what we choose to click on and watch, and we're making terrible choices.

It's a lot like our food diets. We are hard-wired to crave salt, sugar and fat, all of which were hard to come by in earlier eras. But in this age of plenty, industrialized food suppliers have filled supermarket aisles with delicious but unhealthful concoctions aimed at satisfying those cravings. Why? Because we buy them.

In the case of information, we're wired to seek out and retain facts that are essential to our survival. Instead, we're loading up on false information, and that can trigger fear instincts unnecessarily.

You can feast on information as never before, and you can do it without leaving the living room couch. But consuming too much of the wrong kind of information can lead to a kind of information obesity.

And just as it's not General Mills' fault that your child is eating sugary cereal for breakfast, neither can we blame the content providers who bring us Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan. They are giving us those things because we consume them.

There is a way to fix this. Remember that clicks have consequences — for yourself and for the rest of us. Each time you click on a salacious headline on the Huffington Post, for example, you are not only consuming junk information you don't need, you're also all but ensuring that the Huffington Post will continue to push that kind of story.

Your habits have immense power. A movement led by a few dozen activists and a few high-end consumers led Walmart to significantly reduce the salt, fat and sugar content in the foods it sells. You can do the same thing. Consume deliberately, consume close to the original source, consume less and produce more. Seek facts, not comfort. And not all the time. We'll all be better off.

Clay Johnson is author of "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption."

© 2012 Los Angeles Times