Episode 026 | Mario Vasilescu: Cutting Through Information Pollution to Deal With Climate Change

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY IMPERATIVE Podcast

This is a slightly different kind of podcast. Typically I interview guests who are in some way making a difference through their efforts to deal with the causes or effects of climate change and other environment-related challenges. This podcast is no different, but the approach is very different: In today’s podcast, I interview Mario Vasilescu about “information pollution.”

“What does “information pollution” have to do with climate change and the Twenty First Century Imperative?” Well, as you will hear in this episode, Mario argues that if we are going to deal with climate change, we first need to be able to agree on reality. And given the ever increasing difficulty of internet “information pollution,” that is becoming ever-more harder to do.

So in this podcast Mario and I talk about “information pollution”, what it is, why we need to deal with it, and how we can deal with it, in order to have more effective conversations about how to meet the challenges of the Twenty First Century Imperative.

Background

Mario is a robotics engineer turned humane technologist and media ecologist. He describes himself as “obsessed with rethinking how we measure and value attention”, and writes and speaks on the subject where it intersects with the future of work, media, and education. He is now putting his thinking into practice with his innovative, and award-winning company and social media platform, Readocracy.com, where he is both CEO and CPO. Readocracy rewards and recognizes users for being well-informed, and helps users track and improve their content consumption. As Mario says: “Readocracy is like a Fitbit to track your information diet.” Mario graduated from Ontario Tech (previously known as the University of Ontario Institute of Technology) in 2012 majoring in Mech-a-tronic Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Business Management. During his final year he won two national competitions in social media innovation and the future of work, which landed him a role at the think tank of a multinational HR and change-management consulting firm based out of Paris, France, where he continued digging into these subjects to map emerging trends related to the role of different generations and technology at work.

Mario has led digital projects for organizations at the national level in both Canada and France, and has spoken about emerging trends at leading media conferences, as well as directly to the leadership teams of some of the world’s largest media organizations. When he isn’t working on Readocracy, you can find him enthusiastically cooking or eating, playing or watching basketball or hockey, writing, making art, and almost always listening to one of his many themed playlists.

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You can read more about this podcast in the podcast’s Show Notes.

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