Dear Void,
This one's a doozie. We start with memory and knowledge.
Memory: as in the ones in our head and which we speak and communicate and hold as in suspension among family members and even society as a whole, and Knowledge: as in what is spoken, written, collected, gathered, tabulated and learned through long years of experience and stored, amassed, treasured, disseminated, or otherwise passed on.
Memory is predicate for knowledge, and knowledge is predicate for all sorts of other things. Such as the understanding and use of languages, both spoken and written; or the creation of tools, both physical and mental; or the understanding and use of time, both time exhibited by ourselves, in aging, and by the universe about us.
It is our memory which is the key ability for all of this. That memory which is accumulated one year to the next, one season to the next, each day, each hour—till we know what a year is, till we define it; till we know what days mark the turning points of seasons; till we define time itself, and what it means, to us.
Still, today, in the storage of data, we continue this human tradition of recording and passing on what we remember.
Knowledge is also predicate to wisdom. However, whereas knowledge is often seen as an accumulation of information, wisdom is a cutting away, a clearing of the path to get at the heart root of a matter.
I think it goes without saying that, nowadays, though we may have boundless information available at our fingertips, this accessibility to knowledge, up until this point in history impossible for most of our species, does not of itself precipitate the blossoming of wisdom nor the maturation of our emotions.
This seemingly unbounded accessibility to information, rather, we have seen, can just as easily, if not instinctually or habitually, precipitate the fungal growth of ignorance and the demonization of our fellow human; along with those twin parasites of misinformation and disinformation spreading their spores wherever they might.
It appears that not all knowledge, indeed perhaps the vast majority of knowledge out there, does not in the end lead us to truth but to befuddlement. It's a simple case of too much of a good thing, which in the sheer ease of its availability, like the drive-thru validation of our beliefs and hopes and fears, leads to a gluttony, a greed, a lust for information, which in and of itself is not good or healthy or wise.
I'm old school when it comes to temptation.
I am, in heart and practice, an ascetic. I am a soldier of the spartanic infantry mold. I am an engineer fixed on the exorcism and casting away of waste. I am an author who seeks the meaning of my life in words, in stories. I am a father and a husband who has already found that meaning.
It is the things in my memory which I wish to pass on, to tell the story of. It all begins and ends with memory, with the meaning of a word, with my memory of a word, with the first word in a long tale, though I'll have to wait and see how it all ends.
Therefore my solution should be obvious. I do not call for merely an information diet, I call for the whole availability of information and how it's consumed to be positioned into the crosshairs. However it is ultimately up to the individual to decide the pathway, the career, the life they want and that includes choosing not the information which is being sold to you but the information which you truly desire, in your heart of hearts. The knowledge. The memories. You want.
But, of course, limits apply.