From Our Brains to Yours
Information versus Knowledge
Flipping through this month’s issue of Wired, I found myself with a little bit of literary deja vu. In his missive, “Manufacturing Confusion: How More Information Leads to Less Knowledge,” Clive Thompson argues that the “information revolution” hasn’t brought about greater knowledge, understanding, or widespread acceptance of truth, but rather it has wrought confusion and misinformation. More people having more access to more information doesn’t make any of that information better, it doesn’t remove the incentives to misinform, and it doesn’t make it harder to misinform: in fact, it’s easier than ever to confuse and distort, and harder than ever to set the record straight. It turns out that more information doesn’t equal more knowledge.
The argument strikes me as generally true, and his examples are compelling: large percentages of people believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, though there’s incontrovertible proof he is not. Why do so many believe what is verifiably untrue? Because individuals and entities whose interests are served by spreading that little lie spent time, energy, and money making sure it zipped across the information superhighway directly to the computer screens of those most likely to believe it. The resources required to refute it would be massive and in the scheme of things wasted, so information that should die a small quiet death lives on with a too-large megaphone.
Now think of every dystopia you’ve read: is there a familiar theme? In all of those I’ve read and remember a trademark of misery is an absence of reliable truth. In some visions of our near future, the absence of truth is thanks to a maleavolent government. I’m thinking of Farenheit 451 and 1984. In others, it’s thanks to an overabundance of information and a paucity of knowledge. Caleb Carr’s Killing Time comes to mind, with it’s iconic topic sentence: “It is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge.” In Carr’s vision of our near future (the novel is set in 2023) no single entity has caused the hyper-wired and plugged in populace to consume mass quantities of misinformation, it’s a consequence of too much and too easily manipulated information. Think Photoshop and mashups alongside “legitimate” news in a constant stream of bits and bytes too large and moving too fast to parse too closely.
Clive Thompson says the future is now. We’re immersed in a sea of information, some of it good, some of it bad, but so much of it it’s hard to tell the difference. So we have lots more information, but very little additional knowledge.
So what? For our purposes, it means the organizations, candidates, and individuals that can be trusted to synthesize information into reliable knowledge will have the keys to the kingdom. Donors, voters, consumers – all of us – will increasingly be hunting for those streams of information that provide us not only with bits of this and bits of that, but a sense of a whole that makes sense and can be trusted. My job will be to hep my clients fill that role.
With great power comes great responsibility, of course: a small slip and these paragons of wisdom will be cast aside faster than a snuggie in the summer, doomed to the dustbin of irrelevance.
A still bigger question looms: as the institutions that we as a populace used to lean on to provide this common sense of knowledge wither and die (think newspapers and the evening news), it seems clear that rather than building new institutions that provide a common view of reality, we’re balkanizing our information sources and turning in groups to the sources that report to us what we already think we know. That can only serve to cement untruths and further prevent accumulation of knowledge. And that is a subject for a future post.