The idea for this article came as I was walking to work the other day. At the most fundamental level, I marveled at the wealth of information that’s available to us in this digital age. For me personally, having access to information and data is critical – I’m a very self-motivated individual who doesn’t mind wading through the plethora of data to find what I’m looking for.
Over the past few years, I’ve taken advantage of this data availability on numerous occasions. From looking up medical information, to helping me navigate the wonderfully complex and convoluted legal system, to using the Internet as a tool to research productions before I buy. All of this has made instant availability to information a very valuable tool in my kit.
The first problem that we face is that there’s just too MUCH information available. I know that sometimes I’ll be sitting there at Google and I have to think “What is it that I’m really looking for”. This is the core starting point for research and it dictates which branch of research that we’ll take. Quite often, I’ll take a look at the preliminary search results and I’ll say “no, this isn’t what I’m looking for” and I’ll go back to how I structured my search term and I revise accordingly. Sometimes just changing the order of the phrases can make a difference in the search results.
The second problem is that once I know that I’m going along the right path, and I’m looking at the sites that were returned by the search engine, there’s still a big challenge. It’s a critical task to ascertain the legitimacy, accuracy and objectiveness of the website. I’ve said this before, but I think that it’s so important to be eternally pessimistic about the objectivity of any online source. I try to always assume that there is bias in the information presented, and if it doesn’t seem right to me, I’ll cross-reference with another site or do a brief sojourn to a separate search on this one topic.
As this article started formulating in my own mind, the general theme mutated from being just about information access to something a little bit different, and that is, what is the difference between information and knowledge.
When I came up with this question in my own mind, I thought that it would be simply a matter of looking up the dictionary definition of knowledge and from that, I can draw a comparison between it and information. It turns out that this isn’t so cut and dried.
There are numerous philosophies on what knowledge is, and what it isn’t. I had no idea that there are many debates between people that are much more philosophical than me, so I will defer on diving too much into this debate with this article.
As I think about this topic some more, I have my own definition on what knowledge is and how it relates to information.
To me, information is the data; it describes a product, a process, a law or defines and describes something. Information on its own doesn’t draw an inference as to the underlying data or otherwise make correlation between other components. My definition of knowledge is the intellectual exercise that attempts to interpret the facts that are presented.
An example I could give of this is that at a trial, the evidence presented, would be equivalent to the information. On its own, it just exists. The prosecution or the defense infers and theorizes about the evidence – this is the knowledge (or in the case the theory, I suppose) that is based on the facts presented.
If I’m on the right track about this distinction between information and knowledge, then I would contend that we truly are in the “Information Age”, that what is available to us is the raw data. The sophistication of the “Knowledge Age” will be where our technology not only presents us with the “dumb” search results but will be able to intrinsically determine what it is that we’re REALLY looking for, and attempt to deliver results in a context that’s closer to what it is that we really need.
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