How to Consume

Now that you have learned the symptoms of information overconsumption, and the skills to select data, you are ready to master “how to consume”. Johnson specifies frameworks that will help teach you “how to consume”. These frameworks include consuming consciously, diversity, and balance. Consume consciously means keeping your information diet clean. For example, measuring your information intake is always helpful. You can do this by making an information schedule to help be more productive: list what times you are going to watch the news, look at emails, or enjoy media entertainment. A healthy information diet means seeking out diversity, both in topic area and in perspective. If we challenge our beliefs, we can make our ideas even better and learn more about the world as a whole. By doing this, we avoid “loss of social breadth”. Lastly, if we want a healthy information diet, we must have balance. This means for the amount of time we spend consuming things we believe in, we should spend twice as much time seeking information from sources that disagree with you (Johnson, 115).