It's easy to forget how polarizing and strong a force the act of defining is in our world. I was at a recent debate over whether morality could exist without a god and one of the major points was what a person means when they say morality is 'objective'. Many people are on either side of the fence of the abortion debate due to how they define life (though that is by no means the only reason to feel either way). These are cases of conflicting definitions. But when it comes to the concept of knowledge, we have less a conflict of clear definitions but rather the frustrating issue of a concept getting murkier. Talking about knowledge is becoming increasingly alienating and unwieldy.
As a society increasingly obsessed with generating knowledge, we're finding our way of talking and thinking about knowledge inadequate to how we actually experience it. We've moved, at least partially, from storing to processing information--but until we reconsider how we are defining and classifying our knowledge, we're going to get frustrated and disconnected.
Right now, something like spellcheck is a crutch--I use it to hide my terrible spelling in my writing. That makes me look more intelligent (well, not less intelligent, at least) and helps get my points across. But it's not like any of my written communication is handwritten anymore. Every time I write, I'm using spellcheck. Can I call that a useful tool anymore? Or is it now a normal, even integral part of writing?
Let's take it a step further. Anyone you know with an IPhone or equivalent smart phone is about two minutes away from finding out any basic fact you want to know. Population of Uganda? 25,827,000. Who played the inventor in Edward Scissorhands again? Vincent Price. He also in this buddy cop/zombie movie called Dead Heat. That one's on the house.
As these devices become ubiquitous, what will be more important than knowing these basic facts is strategies for getting reliable information easily. I don't have to know these facts because I know where to get them. As this becomes more common, what counts are true knowledge may shift.
A little pause here to quote from the disarmingly straightforward Saul--a passage I quoted on here in 2008 but is worth another look.
"[The general public] react to waves of expert truth which continue to wash over them with a sort of mute indifference. An uninvolved outsider might interpret this as the first stages of a purification rite. Indifference is often the manner behind which humans consider change. Given our history, it should be possible to decipher our intent. We are trying to think our way out of a linguistic prison. This means we need to create new language and new interpretations, which can only be accomplished by re-establishing the equilibrium between the oral and the written. This is a situation in which dictionaries should again be filled with doubt, questioning and considerations. They can then be used as practical weapons of change."
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion
It's been two years since I first read those words and I find myself still struck by how obvious yet brilliant they are. As information becomes easier to obtain, we're forced to deal with more of it--assaulted from more sides we can't deal with info at the same rate it's coming in. As real knowledge becomes more specialized, we can no longer communicate across professions or interests. A particle physicist and a chemist, even though they're both scientists, would have very little in common to discuss beyond the basic info anyone has easy access to.
The point is that if you care to look you have instant access to the majority of human knowledge ever produced. As a result, just knowing stuff isn't good enough anymore. We've responded by making knowledge more specialized, but that's cut us off from each other. Culturally, we've arrived at a state of difficult evolution: used to solving problems by generating more info, but the real problems now require--to paraphrase Gregory Treverton--judgements on uncertain situations with no straight, factual answers.
Within the past 50 we've gained new ways of thinking. These new, technologically supported ways can help us--like a hydraulic press lifting a car for a mechanic we can make our lives/jobs easier by using the emphasis on processing rather than knowing to free up our brains for more important info. However, if we paralyze ourselves into obsessively gathering data, we'll be unable to keep up. Rather than info sponges, we need to learn how to become filters.
ps-Malcom Gladwell has a great article applying some of these ideas to the Enron scandal. Read it here.
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