Content Calories & Information Diets
what food history, culture and corporations can teach us to help us tackle mental obesity in a hyperconnected age
PART 2 — TOWARDS A SOLUTION
Time has never not been scarce. Ironically enough, the effort invested in saving more of it by streamlining one’s work, one’s home, and even oneself, is tailed by boundless opportunities to fill it again — and not always with the meaningful things we plan to fill it with. As it stands, we manage to pack 10 hours and 52 minutes worth of media and communications into our time every day (and into only 8+ hours of actual screentime), according to the latest Ofcom report.
As access becomes unlimited, and content continues to become infinitely abundant, it is worth contemplating (and possibly even mitigating) what the future holds for our minds and collective attention in this context. In other words, we must ensure that being connected is a sustainable mode of being, rather than a perpetrator of ‘mental obesity’. To that end, it is worth looking to the food industry, to see what it can teach us about temptation and how to bring about positive behaviour change.
A Brief History Of Food Culture
In the 1950’s, post-war consumer culture was quickly and profoundly seduced by processed, convenience food. Just like the first white goods, convenience (including fast) food promised liberation from time-consuming feats, such as cooking and cleaning. Instead, it enabled people to get more work in, more things done, and to spend more quality time with those that shared their home.
People entrusted large food manufacturers with their tastes and cash, and mass production became a seal of quality. However, to satisfy growing demand for low-cost convenience food, new production processes and sciences were invented, new preservatives were added, and new rules for consumption were created by marketing and advertising (inevitably gunning for more consumption, more often). The holy trinity of salt, sugar and fat engendered loyalty directly in the pleasure centre of the consumer’s brain, arguably at the expense of many arteries and waistlines, but in most cases, it was the only diet that was known and/or affordable.
Decades of easy (or only having) access to tasty, processed food later, and developed societies are suffering the consequences of their ignorance towards whether or not this food was good for them on a physiological and emotional level in the first place. Obesity continues to rise, and intolerances are increasingly becoming mainstream — so much so that Danone, one the world’s largest producers of dairy products, acquired White Wave, one of the world’s largest producer of nut milk and other dairy alternatives, in 2016.
It is also no wonder we find ourselves in a wellbeing and fitness boom — an attempt to over-correct the effects of processed convenience foods, and the time-poor lifestyles they underpinned (although some will rightfully argue it is also an attempt at regaining control in a world in which there is none, or simply being camera-ready at all time). Gym memberships are surging, cross fit/barre/lifting sessions are now acceptable social media currency (threatening to replace mementoes of exciting experiences or displays of material wealth as the new proxy for social success). ‘Clean’ and ‘raw’ and ‘activated’ foods have graduated from Whole Foods and now find themselves on high street shelves. Technology is working relentlessly to give us eggless eggs, meatless meat, and shakes optimised to nutritional requirements without reeking havoc on body and planet, let alone waste time cooking for those who don’t care about food beyond its function (the infamous ethos behind Soylent).
The extent to which existing damage is being reversed, or future damage is being mitigated by all these efforts is difficult to prove. Socio-economic divisions that deny access to alternatives — let alone time for self-care or self-improvement — are inevitably amplified. But the current towards change is undeniable.
Cybercandy
Today, information and content are easier than ever to access, wherever and whenever it is convenient to be read or viewed. And just like candy, it is hard to resist reaching for it, hard to resist stepping over the threshold for tolerance, and hard to develop a discipline around how much of it is ‘healthy’ to consume.
The effects of physical obesity are strikingly similar to some of the effects of mental obesity we observed in a recent study with hyperconnected late teens & young adults (16–24). The study entailed depriving one group of connectivity, while overstimulating another with abundant access. It revealed that low energy (commonly associated with physical obesity) could also be attributed to sustained periods of binge-watching content, a series of social streams or falling down a so-called ‘rabbit-hole’ on YouTube, Instagram or Wikipedia when curiosity arises. Pulses drop, breathing slows, and sedation kicks in.
In turn, the subjects that were deprived of connectivity were reporting back feeling more energised, more sociable with real people and more relaxed throughout the experiment. In contrast, those who were overstimulated felt disconnected, overwhelmed and feared addiction if unlimited access was ever to become their reality (which it will).
Moreover, there is mounting evidence that links over-indulging on content to grave effects — a Japanese study recently even drew a link between television binges and an increased risk of developing pulmonary embolisms, which obesity sufferers are also at risk of. There is also a long-list of emotional health issues, such as low self-esteem, triggered — as multiple studies have found — by excessive amounts of time spent looking at the presumed better lives/homes/physiques/faces/holidays of others on social media. Furthermore, narcissistic personality disorder, as claimed by a recent American study, is rising as fast as obesity. Not getting a response to, or validation of, shared content or messages triggers anxiety, which, as our study found, 37% of hyperconnected 16–24-year-olds admit to feeling in those instances.
Implicitly suggesting one isn’t enough has been a staple theme in lifestyle media and advertising for decades — yet it is no longer confined to a monthly magazine’s editorial or passively consumed advertising Instead, it is amplified, on tap, in the endless stream, multiple times a day, often in echo chambers solely made up of content that makes those trapped inside them feel inadequate.
As the parallels between the drivers and effects of easy, tasty food and content consumption crystalise, it is worth contemplating what a more sustainable relationship with the latter could look like. Therefore, it is worth taking advantage of what our 60+ years of our relationship with food have taught humans and businesses alike.
Indices & RDA’s
One of the earliest attempts to balance diets was to formalise calorie, mineral and micronutrient values and to standardise allowances. The premise was a simple and important one — to help people make better food decisions so as to maintain their health, although the maths proved complex, impenetrable and boring to be followed meticulously.
Nonetheless, it created a sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of boundaries for calories, and optimal quantities of salt, fat and sugar, that, at their core, helped create a feeling of being responsible and making the ‘right’ decisions amongst those who cared to do so. The media was harnessed by mainstream food ‘saints’, and played a vital role shaming corporates into action, with a view to helping the consumer make better decisions (e.g. following Jamie Oliver’s public pressure on food conglomerates’ use of battery farmed eggs in their products, some of the biggest brands in the UK buckled and swapped these for free range).
This now bodes the question whether information and content could also benefit from an ‘index’ and a ‘recommended daily allowance’ too, thereby enabling people to gain a better understanding of how much of what they should be consuming for the sake of retaining a better quality of mind.
Furthermore, while perhaps ludicrous to imagine right now, information and content experiences could even display such units, values and allowances alongside themselves. There may have been many gasps when pasta sauce manufacturer Dolmio embarked on printing cigarette-etiquette-style ‘consume once a week’ warnings on their packaging, but there is a lesson to be learned in taking greater accountability when your consumer is unwilling to trade taste or value for pricier or time-consuming alternatives.
‘Information Diets’
Whether it is mitigating a diet-related ailment, an unwelcome physical effect of ‘bad’ food habits, or to maintain personal wellbeing, diet programs remain a sought-after solution for those who seek change (to the tune of approx. $600bn annually). Building on an index and an RDA, there are three types of diets to learn from to translate awareness into action.
They include abstinence-led diets, from full-on fasts to ingredient-specific purges from the daily food intake, such as Atkins (no carbohydrates) or sugar detoxes. There are the more lenient diets that avoid deprivation of pleasures altogether by attempting to balance them with space, such as the 5/2 diet, where a limited number of calories is consumed on two days of the week. Finally, there is the ‘clean eating’ diet, which replaces processed food with healthier alternatives.
Controversies about each cited diet aside (there are many, particularly about the latter) — as people find themselves exposed to the equivalent of a lavish all-you-can-eat buffet every time a media stream is opened, let’s view them as blueprints. Blueprints, that can help people work out how best to balance ‘good’ and ‘bad’ information/content experiences, and figuring out an optimum intake.
Coaches & Programs
Multiple studies into the efficacy of diets have revealed that people on diets which require calorie-counting activities have a tendency to under-count and under-report. Suffice to say, when left to their own devices, people don’t have a great track record with intangible units, let alone when it comes to achieving food goals or resisting temptation for something more satisfying — an escape to ‘delicious’ King’s Landing or ‘junky’ Calabasas will often trump ‘nutritious’ TED talks, especially when the compulsion is to relax and/or escape.
So in an age where everyone can have a personal trainer for their fitness, nutrition or mind in their pocket, technology could also be deployed and attuned to every individuals’ parameters, coaching them to sustain an ‘intake’ best suited to their lives.
In fact, we’re already seeing a genre of products emerge designed to digest and filter news and communications streams for us (such as Watchup and Google’s Allo), and another that helps us shut the same distractions off in exchange for focus (such as Freedom or Go F***ing Work). The fintech and fitness sectors are abundant with personal finance and exercise coaching services respectively, so the idea of a ‘content coach’ might align well with the trend towards us gathering a suite of specialist agents.
Towards Sustainable Attention
Whilst it is tempting to explore what the equivalent of Coke-Zero-style mobile data and internet bundles might look like, let alone how you could transfer the equivalent of a sugar tax onto, say, reality TV streaming services or Instagram’s ‘Discovery’ tab, it is worth pausing to debate, explore and sharpen early thoughts in this space.
The aforementioned Ofcom’s report into the communication landscape contains an entire chapter on ‘coping with the connected world’, highlighting areas of daily Internet excesses, its negative effects (neglecting housework, missing out on sleep, and growing apart from relatives). It also cites the rise of the ‘digital detox’ in culture — a process characterised by deliberate abstinence (which, for a small, yet noteworthy, percentage also includes ‘downspinning’ their mobile data tariff and opting for dumber phones).
Before we, as a telco in particular, find ourselves combating the ‘mental obesity’ epidemic in solution-mode, or even being shamed by media and emerging social movements (like timewellspent.io), primary insight suggests it’s time to think about how we can encourage our customers to have a more sustainable relationship with the things connectivity facilitates — i.e. content experiences, information, social networking, communication and gaming, to name a few.
Ideally, it is a relationship that allows for, rather than denies, customers enjoyment, escape, feeding curiosity, and simply feeling ‘plugged in’ to the vast streams of information at their fingertips — but in a way that is finite, balanced, and healthy.
