Information Overconsumption

As I stated in the introduction, Johnson explains how our society has the issue of information overconsumption. The average person spends more than eleven hours per day consuming information. This information is located in books, newspapers, television, social media, your music library, and other places. For people that work in front of a computer screen the amount of information consumed a day is even more. According to the University of California in San Diego, American homes consume almost 3.6 zettabytes in a day. This is a massive amount considering one zettabyte is equal to a million petabytes, and there are only 800,000 petabytes in the information storage universe. It is clear that there is information overconsumption.

The reason that the issue with our intake of information is not considered information overload is because the overload means “somehow managing the intake of vast quantities of information in new and more efficient ways” (Johnson, 26). Clay Johnson states in his book and many of his interviews that calling the problem information overload is putting blame on the information. He uses a food analogy by stating that when someone is obese, it is not the fault of fried chicken. It is the consumer’s choice to digest the chicken, which causes the obesity. It is the consumer’s choice of what information to consume. People do not have a maximum amount of fat they can store, and we do not have a maximum capacity for knowledge. The real problem is the information overconsumption. Instead of consuming bad information (like an unhealthy food), we can intake good information (like vegetables). There is the choice in being more selective of what information we ingest.

According to ContendedWriter, good information is relevant, reliable, and valid. With information overconsumption, there is a lot of “bad” information that people consume. When people use the most popular search engine, Google, most are unaware of why websites come at the top of the results compared to others. In the chapter “Google’s ways and means” in The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses how Google’s results work. Vaidhyanathan explains how Google uses a search algorithm called PageRank. PageRank places results that have the most sites linked to it. Most referenced pages are the ones that are most found on Google. This algorithm gives power to sites that know the true value of the hyperlink. The product of this is people getting reffered to sites that have the most hyperlinks within it, but not what is truly popular. Because Google is not always giving searchers the best and most relevant information, due to the PageRank system, people often consume bad information. A better way for Google to rank its results is through precise comprehensiveness. This system gives a “list of results that appears to be clear and ranked in order of relevance” (Vaidhyanathan, 59). The sites that receive the most clicks and visits are presented first on the list of results. The overconsumption of bad information leads directly to information obesity. 
         Another form of bad information that makes up our overconsumption is the affirmation of being right. People love being told that they are correct. Information is conforming to what the users want and let them now they are right rather than telling the truth. In Johnson's eyes people need to have a conscious consumption of information and consume what is best.