The “Civic Connector” is a daily online forum during the 66th Annual National Conference on Citizenship. Each day, NCoC.net will feature commentary from a civic sector leader. These discussions will contribute to conversations throughout the Annual Conference Events.

The September 18 commentator is Clay Johnson of Big Window Labs. Clay’s “Civic Connector” question was “What is the state of our civic information infrastructure and what is the single greatest thing we can do to strengthen it?”
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I'd like to draw your attention to two interesting pieces of recent research:

One: We now produce more information in two days than we did throughout all of human history up until 2002. According to a UCSD study, since 1980 our consumption of raw words more than doubled: we're now consuming more than a dickens novel worth of words per day. Measured in bytes, the average American household is consuming more than 38 Gigabytes of data per day, and spending 11.8 hours a day doing it.

Two: Facts, as it turns out, aren't particularly useful. In studies done by researchers like Drew Westen at Emory, and Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, it turns out that facts aren't particularly good for persuading people. Westen argues that we're particularly wired for certain viewpoints, and Nyhan argues that when people are presented with facts that go against their own views, it actually strengthens their resolve. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in their great paper "Why do Humans Reason" came up with a theory: being based in facts doesn't have an evolutionary advantage, but being persuasive does. Perhaps our capacity for argumentation and reason is built not for the socratic synthesis of ideas, but for the ability to persuade others.

These two points should yield one conclusion: affirmation trumps information. Case in point: look at the success of Fox News on the Right, and MSNBC on the Left, and CNN's unwillingness to be outwardly partisan and its resulting ratings plummet. Our news networks are rapidly transforming themselves, in order to pay the bills, from information providers to information distributors.

We need to start thinking about information in the same way we do food. Affirmation is the new carbohydrate, and information obesity is just as deadly as physical obesity but far more nefarious. We cannot simply release good, high quality information about communities to the public and expect it to do any good -- just as we cannot expect to flood grocery store shelves with broccoli and expect people to get thin. There's an information obesity epidemic, and until it gets solved: until information consumption habits become a real public health concern, our great work in providing troves of high quality and free information will be all for nought. We are, after all, competing with the rest of those 38 gigs and 100,000 words per day.

In Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, he provides a framework for food consumption: "Eat. Not too much. Mostly plants." I'd like to suggest we adopt a new mantra for healthy information consumption:

"Read. Not too much. Mostly facts."
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You’ve read what Clay has to say, now we want to hear from you... “What is the state of our civic information infrastructure and what is the single greatest thing we can do to strengthen it?”