Food for Thought (and/or Half-Baked Thought): Notes on "The Information Diet"

By Rich Fisher

Tulsa, OK – On today's ST, we speak with Clay Johnson about his new book, "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption." Everyone knows that many of us --- perhaps most of us --- seem to be obsessed with information these days. We incessantly check our favorite websites, texts, instant messages, emails, downloads, videos, status updates, tweets, etc. Much of this stuff, Johnson argues, is the mental equivalent of junk food --- and so his book calls for a smarter, healthier, and more productive approach to our appetite for ever-more media. Clay Johnson founded Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed President Obama's online campaign for the White House in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built a large conglomerate of developers and designers to build open source tools that give people greater access to government data.