Often, in sunny California, you will run into slogans plastered around buildings, lining sidewalks, in stores, and in other places where people frequently go which give imperatives like,
- READ
- SPEAK
- VOTE
...and so on and so forth.
Now, looking into just who is giving these messages and what they want, it is not difficult to discern just what sorts of things they want you to read, what sorts of things they want you to speak, and how they want you to vote. If what you had to say was contrary to what they were saying and it had the potential "critical mass" to say... change the course of an election, well you wouldn't expect this sort of messaging now, would you?
Content
Of course it matters what you read, not just that you do read. At a beginner stage, it may be useful to read any words to get used to the sounds/spelling/etc of a language, but even so you wouldn't want to delve into reading mind-warping stuff.
Similarly, to speak usually requires that you practice saying some words. But you can do useful/normal things like ask everyday life questions and use language to do work rather than recite potentially occult incantations "just for fun".
Filtering
We live in an age where we are often told more is better. If someone has read a bunch of Wikipedia, many people will regard this person as a rather broad-minded, learned person. The acquisition of trivia(l) knowledge is a favorite activity of bar nights, 1 particularly among the self-proclaimed nerd/geek types.
Pride in uselessness—e.g. just reading for the sake of reading is no bueno. In my own life, I've studied a bunch of languages. Is that a good thing? If I don't do anything useful with this knowledge, I'm pretty much just wasting my time—though it could be worse. 2 I don't even tell other people to go study a second language if they haven't started it, despite having practiced this for many years. Maybe they have learned something else useful that I don't know how to do (e.g. how to maintenance on cars).
It is better to filter and guard ourselves against things that are not good to see/hear/dwell on.