Vitamodo School · Bundle 6: Information Consumption · Brochure 7 of 10 · Version 1.0
Andris Saulitis, MD
For those who: have done the reading on contemporary information patterns and now want a working position on what to do about them at the level of daily and weekly practice — the practical synthesis of Bundle 6 into a sustainable diet a real life can hold.
Not for those who: want a prescription — which applications to delete, which publications to read, which platforms to leave. The brochure addresses the structure of a sustainable diet; the specific decisions follow from the structure and are the patient's to make.
What this is — the clinical reality
This brochure is the practical synthesis of Bundle 6. The earlier brochures named the patterns — devices and ambient connectivity, the optimisation targets of the systems that deliver content, the algorithmic shaping of attention, the affective and structural patterns of outrage and informational lock-in, the cognitive substrate the contemporary environment exploits. This brochure addresses the question those brochures point toward: given the patterns, what does a sustainable information life actually look like at the level of the patient's daily and weekly practice. The brochure is for the reader who has done the reading, has recognised the patterns, and now wants a working position on what to do about them in practice.
The metaphor of an information diet is useful and has limits worth naming at the beginning. The useful part is that information, like food, is a continuous input to the patient's cognitive and affective system; that the composition of that input shapes the patient over time in ways that are slow and substantive; that excess and deficiency are both possible; and that the patient is in a position to choose, within real constraints, what they let in. The limits of the metaphor are that information has no satiety signal — the body that registers the eighth piece of bread as enough has no equivalent mechanism for the eight-hundredth notification — and that the systems delivering information have, unlike most systems delivering food, been specifically engineered to extend consumption beyond the point at which an unaided patient would stop. The metaphor is therefore useful for thinking about composition and accurate for naming the problem of unboundedness, but it understates how much active work the patient has to do to construct the satiety signal that the system will not provide.
A note before we go further. The brochure is not a list of which applications to delete, which publications to read, or which platforms to leave. The specific recommendations would be outdated within months and would substitute prescription for the clinical reasoning the patient needs. The brochure is about the structure of a sustainable information life; the specific decisions follow from the structure and are the patient's to make.
Three frames carry the information-diet question.
The first frame is what an information diet actually is. The unit of analysis the patient is constructing.
An information diet is not a quantity of time spent on screens. It is the structured set of inputs the patient's cognitive and affective system processes over the course of a day, a week, and a year. The relevant variables are composition, frequency, intensity, source, and absence. Composition is what kinds of content the patient is taking in — news, long-form analysis, conversation, fiction, work-related material, ambient social signal. Frequency is how often each kind arrives. Intensity is how much arousal or affective load each kind carries. Source is who selected the content and on what optimisation target. Absence is the periods in which no input arrives at all.