Part of what’s prescribed in The Information Diet is to get beyond secondary sources and straight to the details. The irony is, the book itself is a secondary source. A lot of what’s in the book come from the work and actions of the people mentioned in it, and from others who influenced it. Thanks to the innovations of social media, we can now see directly what those people have to say and hear things directly from them.
Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts is the head of the web-spam team at Google, the person with the job of managing Panda, and maintaining Google’s delicate search relationship with content farms. He’s been called “Google’s Greenspan.”
Twitter · Google+ · http://mattcutts.com
danah boyd
danah boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, who – at Gov2.0 Expo in 2010, spoke on the relationship between transparency and obesity
Susan Crawford
Susan Crawford is a law professor at the Cardozo Law School in New York City. Her work with net neutrality and universal broadband and the parallels between what’s happening now in telecommunications and what happened with the railroads are very similar to my own work with the parallels between agribusiness and media.
Marco Iacaboni
Dr. Iacaboni’s insight on the consequences of neuroplasticity and how we affect each other is tremendously important to follow.
Ryota Kanai
Dr. Kanai’s research links our brain’s structure to our political affiliations. His continued interests are around our perception of time, the neuroscience behind our attention, and distractibility.
Brendan Nyhan
Dr. Nyhan’s work on measuring the effectiveness of messaging on the public, and the outcomes of our information consumption is leading the field. Read his papers and engage with him online. He’s responsive and smart.
Robert Proctor
Robert Proctor invented the term agnotology, and was the first historian to testify against big tobacco.
Julian Sanchez
Julian Sanchez is the person who brought the idea of epistemic closure into the modern political dialog. He’s a writer for Reason magazine and the CATO institute.
Linda Stone
Linda Stone’s research on conscious computing, email apnea, and our attention spans is amazing to watch. Follow her work at:
John Tierney
John Tierney is a science columnist for the New York Times and, along with Roy Baumeister, is the author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Twitter · NYT
Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis is an associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Gradute School of Journalism. While he’s not directly quoted in this book, his thought leadership around the field of journalism is worth paying attention to.
Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor teaches digital media entrepreneurship and is founding director of the Knight Center on Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His work is trying to make sense of the new fields of journalism and how the digital industrialization of it can yield new business models.
Jim Gilliam
Jim Gilliam is the consummate civic hacker, using his skills to try and connect people to each other and to the levers of power in their local communities. He’s the founder of 3dna, a start-up in California that builds tools to shake up a political system, most recently NationBuilder, an affordable tool that allows people to organize effectively.