A metaphor of information as food

I just watched a TED vdo, a talk by JP Rangaswami who gave information an analogy of food.

Link to the vdo page here

From his conclusion at the end, we need to control how we consume information, like we control our quality and quantity of foods. We need also to exercise. I think I personally agree and will take precaution out of his suggestion. I have felt that I have information overloads and spent too much time processing them, not enough creating new stuff in the past. That is one point I want to make.

On another aspect, I think of situation in Thailand these days, we have had too much intended public  misinformations, or rather propaganda, and lies, which are equivalent to a lot of junk foods here.  Future historians interested in Thailand of this era will surely have a hard time sifting through information, e.g. in reported news, to determine which one is real which one is fabrication, and what facts were left out due to self-censorships. But that is their future problems. However, the more pressing problem for the current generation of Thais is that the majority of the Thai population have been subjected in the past few years to extensive misinformation, propaganda and plain lies, and information black out for political gains from factions with various ideologies, some extreme. This is more of a concern, since most of the population has no way to know that they have been fed with junk foods laced with toxins.  And this will serve as political time bomb and could break havoc on the society.