Clay Johnson

Author, Digital Strategist

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, is best known as the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011.

Johnson’s combination of experience as a developer, working in politics, entrepreneurism, and non-profit work gives him a unique perspective on media and culture. His life is dedicated to giving people greater access to the truth about what’s going on in their communities, their cities and their governments. He still claims that he learned all he needs to know from a two year tour as the late-shift waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, GA.

There is a Time and Place for Cencorship

Whenever anybody says anything in absolutes when it comes to public policy I’m a little freaked out, but especially when it comes to censorship.

Getting Quality Information is About Staying Healthy

The key to a healthy information diet is understanding that this stuff is about your health, not about productivity or politics or fact-checking.

You Need to Take Personal Responsibility for the Information You Consume

An information diet has to be about personal responsibility.

You Need to Take Personal Responsibility for the Information You Consume

An information diet has to be about personal responsibility.

What You Read is an Ethical Choice

When you click on an article you are voting. You’re telling an editor to produce more content like that at the expense of the stuff that you didn’t click on.

Does Anybody Remember Laughter? How to Make Information Fun Again

If you’re losing your sense of humor, if you’re not able to laugh at things, then what are you doing? It’s an indicator that maybe information that you’re consuming has […]

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Software Developers, Step Up!

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Clay Johnson

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Information Obesity: Take Responsibility, Fatty.

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says that the term “information overload” is misleading. We should talk instead, he suggests, about “information obesity,” and take responsibility as consumers for […]

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4 min

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A Software Toolkit for Your Information Diet

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says you can’t rely on “the media” or the internet to control your information consumption. Here he suggests a few pieces of software […]

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3 min

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Clay Johnson

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Tackling ‘Information Obesity’: Clay Johnson (taped) Live on Big Think

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says that there’s no such thing as information overload – only indiscriminate information overconsumption.

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12 min

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Clay Johnson