I posted some thoughts on Friday about the problem of information coming too quickly for us to reflectively process it – and turn information into useful knowledge and wisdom. The analogy I used there was of a conveyor belt. When it runs slowly the packets come off at a speed that allows us to sort them, whatever our taxonomy may be. But when things are speeded up we get more stuff – which in a consumer world always seems good – but get so much so fast that we have no idea how to usefully use it.

I want to consider another perspective which I think may be useful here: our growing digital obesity.

Obesity is an energy balance problem: more food energy is consumed than is required given the activities we are involved in. Our inactivity and continued bloating becomes self-reinforcing: consumption becomes comforting, and energy use uncomfortable.

It seems that with the consumer-capitalist West’s problem of expanding waistlines comes a parallel problem: information obesity. We consume far more information than we can usefully make use of. Our data feeds (yes, isn’t that interesting usage that’s cropped up?) are always on, and always offering more. And the more information that comes in, the less we feel like actually making good use of it. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

We are simultaneously becoming the most well-informed and slothful generation ever. Knowing everything, and doing very little. Our bodies crammed so full of del.icio.us fresh information that we are unable to move.

The question I posed in the last post was this: how do we throttle the flows we have available, and carve out time for reflection? The solution is proposed was to give more time to sleep: that period when our brains are not receiving new information, but given time to post-process and connect up the data it has been fed.

How does this apply to information obesity? Well, it seems that sensible diet and regular exercise are key. What are you really going to lose if you limit the information you consume each day? Perhaps a dietary purge of your feeds, your follows, those Facebook ‘friends’ that you don’t know from Adam, would help. But that won’t be enough. We need action too. We need to exercise, to take the food we have been given and do something good with it. Scribble, protest, draw, think, campaign, walk, run… Because if we don’t, all of these creamy, sweet information is going to clog us up and lead our hearts to arrest.

We’ll be covering some of this at Apple 8 – Social Networks and Social Action this Weds, 13th. And looking at Information Obesity in particular at Apple 9 on November 17th.

Their recent episode on sustainable energy was very interesting, but fell into the trap that numbers can often set. The key interview was with Professor David Mackay, who has spent a long time doing very detailed calculations on what energy we could realistically harvest from which sources, and what sort of things we are actually using our energy on.

Asked whether it was worth switching off our mobile phone chargers when not in use, as we are often reminded to do, he scoffed that it was almost entirely pointless and we really shouldn’t bother – the energy used was about the same as driving a car 60m, and measured nothing compared to so many other things.

I think this misses the point, and raises one very important principle that a simplistic rational look at the numbers fails to see: turning off your charger won’t save the planet, but it’s a discipline that reminds us, like a mantra, to think about the bigger decisions we are making with our energy use.

This is the principle of ‘living symbolically’ that I talk about in the forthcoming book: taking actions that are not necessarily effective in themselves, but act as symbols pointing us or others to greater actions that may have a much larger impact.

There’s been quite a lot of environmental pessimism around at the moment – we’re buggered anyway, so why bother changing my lifestyle? – so I feel that it’s more important than ever to take actions, even if they are symbolic, in the hope that collectively these will show those in power that there is real political will to make things happen.

Head over to generous.org.uk to sign up for some actions yourself.