Background Consumption
Kinda related to the idea of dry pleasure that I have written here, this type of consumption of information is "in the background" (not unconscious though, mind you)
I have some examples, but they are very much personal, as background consumption may be very different, depending on the activity and the person, but as far as information consumption is concerned, it's just reading.
Personally I like to read a lot of blogs/papers (very common among the programming community I feel) and this activity, when I am not doing it for the sake of a project, feels like background consumption.
Blogs of opinions, methodologies, frameworks and life experiences influence my thinking in ever so subtle ways, and before I knew it, I would start writing, and start writing like them (I apologise if this seems derogatory, it's not. I want to write like them).
It influences how I think, how I write code or how I choose to deal with other people/situations. Of course it's impact is technically immeasurable, since we cannot (yet) run a counterfactual experiment where I never read any blogs or papers. But to the extent that it's relevant, I feel it has influenced my approach to work and programming in a lot of ways (good/bad ? Who knows) .