Intentional information: why your media diet shapes your reality

Executive overview

The common assumption is that information technology gives us more samples of an objective world — so more is better. This is wrong. The medium through which you receive information doesn't just deliver it; it constructs the world you perceive.

Thinkers from Jonathan Sacks to Neil Postman to neuroscientist Winifred Gallagher all converge on the same insight: your tools shape what reality looks and feels like to you. The world inside your head is built from what you pay attention to, and how.

Intentional information is the philosophy that having intention about what you consume and through what medium is foundational to a deep life — and that most people are currently outsourcing this construction to attention-economy tools optimised against their interests.

The broken model of information

• Standard view: there's an objective world, technology gives us more samples of it, more = better.
• This model ignores that the medium shapes the meaning — tools are not neutral gateways.
• Jonathan Sacks: ancient Hebrew (right-to-left, no vowels) cultivated holistic, contextual reasoning; Greek (left-to-right, vowels) enabled analytical logic and philosophy.
• Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985): coined epistemic environment — the information technology defines how we understand the world, not just what we know about it.
• Winifred Gallagher (Rapt, 2009): the brain neurologically constructs its internal world based on what it pays attention to; attention directly determines well-being.
• Conclusion: there is no single objective world we're sampling — we construct different worlds depending on the tools and formats we use.

Principles of intentional information

• Get non-local news in the most typographically plain format possible, and sparingly — avoid formats designed to provoke clicks or emotional reactions.
• Spend more attention on the worlds where you have agency: your town, employer, community, family — these are the scales human cognition evolved for.
• Prioritise real people over online characters and avatars; avatars distort your model of what people and life are actually like.
• Prioritise real action over watching others act — trails, clubs, volunteering, writing groups beat vicarious thrills.
• Apply steel-manning as medicine for outrage: seek the best-faith version of the opposing view; this doesn't dull your convictions, it removes the sharp emotional edges that prevent effective action.
• Prefer slow entertainment — books, films, live music, nature — over social media scrolling; slower formats build richer internal worlds.
• If you use social media, be specific about the purpose; casual boredom-scrolling is categorically different from targeted use.
• Seek a regular drip of optimistic or inspiring content; if what you consume shapes your world, deliberately include inputs that build a healthier one.

Lifestyle-centric planning and the deep life

• Rather than fixing on specific goals and hoping they bring a good life, define the lifestyle you want across its dimensions (craft, community, health, contemplation) and work backwards.
• Use your body as a depth detector: notice what resonates — a biography, a documentary, a book — and record those examples by life area to distill what you actually want.
• Books are not just instruction manuals; they are raw material for discovering what depth means to you personally.
• For someone struggling to advance: reduce high-distraction screen use and build a slow-information habit; a brain rewired toward reading and reflection has greater analytical and communicative capacity.
• Gap years are best used for intensive journalling and self-reflection, not productivity — the goal is jump-starting the contemplative interior life before adulthood accelerates.

The phone foyer method in practice

• Keeping the phone docked rather than pocket-carried removes the reflexive barrier it creates between parents and children.
• Unstructured, boredom-adjacent time with family produces unexpected meaningful conversations that distracted time forecloses.
• The frame is not productive vs. unproductive but meaningful and intentional vs. arbitrary — the phone foyer method protects the former.

Slow news

• A Swiss watch brand makes a 24-hour single-hand watch to restore a more natural, less anxious relationship with time — echoing Lewis Mumford's thesis that the clock's invention restructured human consciousness.
• A picture book took over a decade from first draft to publication — an example of slow productivity's third principle: obsess over craft until it's right, regardless of timeline.
• Private Eye (UK) satirised Slow Productivity with a cartoon of an author typing one letter then leaning back satisfied — Cal Newport took it as a sign the book had reached cultural visibility in the UK.