Information junk food

It seems that it is the ‘new normal’ to bemoan how easy it is to overdo passive consumption of information on the internet. Facebook, Twitter, random blog posts such as this one – all consume our time but don’t always ad a lot of value. This post is the most recent one that I came across. All true – but almost a tru-ism. Even the comments over on Hacker News were pretty predictable. One of the ‘predictable’ comments compared this sort of low quality information with junk food. Most of these articles seem to end with general exhortations to ‘watch what we read’.

To take the ‘junk food’ analogy further, the invention of ‘junk food’ (low quality – easy to eat food) eventually led to the creation of ‘Nutrition labels’ that at least make it visible to people what the nutritional content of the food is. So what would ‘Nutrition labels’ on our ‘information’ look like? Is this a useful analogy?