Book Review: The Information Diet

Review of: The Information Diet, by Clay A. Johnson (O’Reilly, 2012).

• Buy The Information Diet on Amazon.
• See the website for the book.
• Follow Clay Johnson on Twitter: @cjoh

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Information Metaphors

Metaphors are than just rhetorical flourishes that make poetry sound prettier. On the contrary: linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show us in their book Metaphors We Live By that metaphors we view the world through the lenses of metaphor. Metaphors underlie our basic conceptual understanding. They contend that:

…metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

When talking about how humans interact with information, a comparison with food and eating has been used in many cases.