Information. Knowledge. Wisdom.
How do we make meaning in our technological world?
How do we transform information to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom?
From waking up to lying in bed at night, we are surrounded by screens filled with headlines screaming for our attention. Videos enticing our desire to click for more. Trying to addict us. Images worming their way into our consciousness, needing just one more swipe.
Do we wonder what they mean? Why should we pay attention? What should we do about it all? Or do we raise our shoulders in a perpetual shrug to sink ever further inward?
When Neil Postman, the education professor, cultural and media critic, addressed the Sixth International Broadcast News Workshop in Toronto on May 27, 1998, he wanted to bring forward one idea, and one idea only. He wanted journalists to think about their jobs as not being in the information business but rather as being in the knowledge business.
Postman stated that “in a technological world, information is a problem, not a solution.”
In 1998, Postman was addressing the problem of the information glut, the overload, its incoherence and meaninglessness. “Whereas information was once an essential resource in helping us gain control over our physical and symbolic worlds, our technological ingenuity has transformed information into a form of garbage, and ourselves as garbage collectors.”
He noted that information is a commodity that is bought and sold, that “comes indiscriminately, whether asked for or not, directed to no one in particular, in enormous volume, at high speeds, disconnected from meaning and import.”
We can only wonder what Postman would think of today’s world, where algorithms lead us to information based on our heightened emotional responses, like Geiger Counters who spot the radioactivity and lead us to even more toxicity.
Neil Postman was a sceptic about the value of technology. He may have been an 18th century man in the 20th century. While that may make him appear to be a Luddite, perhaps history is proving him right. Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” and his work on ‘saving our children from the cellphone’ is only one example of how Postman was prescient.
Postman defined information as “statements about the facts of the world.” Note how he distinguished between facts and statements about facts. In fact, he saw what we now call disinformation for what it was. “Facts are transformed into information only when we take note of them, speak of them… or write about them. By this definition, facts cannot be wrong. They are what they are. Statements about facts – that is, information – can be wrong, and often is.”
Postman points out that if we live in a world of information, “more erroneous statements about the world are available to the public than ever before.”
In his speech, he cites a 1930’s poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour
Rains from sky a meteoric shower
Of facts… they lie unquestioned, uncombed.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom,
To weave it into fabric.
It is precisely this ability to weave information into a coherent fabric of understanding that was missing in the 1930’s and 1998. And still is today.
In Postman’s view, while there is no shortage of information, there is a shortage of knowledge. He defined knowledge “as organized information – information that is embedded in some context; information that has a point of view, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world.”
Postman clarified his view by saying, “When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one’s life. Knowledge also helps us know when information is suspect, but also… helps us to know when information is relevant.”
His belief was that the media was not in the information business, but in the knowledge business. However, very little time and work was put into “providing a sense of context or coherence” for, Postman asserts, the media is really in the “coherence business.”
Postman tells the story of a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy who hurled a Molotov cocktail at two 18-year-old Israeli soldiers, injuring one of the soldier’s eyes. He asks the media to provide context. Why should we know about this story? What is it telling us? Why is it more important than other world conflicts? The media does not ask these questions. It only “contributes to the incoherence and confusion to a mind that is already overloaded with information.”
As recent events show, nothing has changed since 1998.
But of course, Postman goes further, he believes that the media needs to move beyond the knowledge business into… the wisdom business.
“I mean by wisdom,” said Postman, “the capacity to know what body of knowledge is relevant to the solution of significant problems.”
For Postman, “Knowledge must be judged by other knowledge and herein lies the essence of wisdom.” In solving difficult problems, he advises us to think about what systems of knowledge we need to have… to know how these problems might be solved.
“Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge.”
To sum up, Postman asserts that “Wisdom does not imply having the right answers. It implies only asking the right questions.”
From Postman’s’ perspective, the challenge is to transform information into knowledge and to transform knowledge into wisdom.
His talk in 1998 identified the same challenge we experience today; only today, we experience it at a quantum level. We cannot trust the information that pummels us by persistent, internet-fed rogue waves for we know it may too often come from off-shore actors aiming to manipulate our thinking and behaviour. Context is absent. We seem to swallow information whole – that is, information as doctored facts – and don’t ask questions.
However, Postman hints at the remedy at the same time. It could be simply summarized in the following three steps:
1) What is the source of the information? What is in it for them in relaying their version of the facts?
2) What is the context of what we are seeing or hearing? Why is it important? Or is it?
3) What questions should we be asking? And what other knowledge do we need to ask more questions?
This is how we construct knowledge and wisdom. We need to be active participants in the swelling tides of information, or they will wash us away.
We may not be able to change the media and technology landscape, although we can choose to put away the phones and avert our eyes from the screens, but at the very least we can use our brains; we can train ourselves to put what we see through the three-step assessment process. We can seek wisdom.
It is not a coincidence that Postman was an education professor. What he prescribes is the essence of education. This three-step process is fundamental to learning. It is the core belief and methodology we employ as educational communicators. It may not be popular to ask questions, but it is essential. It is a way of arming ourselves in the face of a tsunami of information and is our only hope of surviving a force so much greater than our own.
Educational communications seeks to tackle big problems by focusing on the inquiry – the why. That’s what we do.
We ask learners to consider the source of information, to place it into a context and to ask what more they need to know to ask more questions. Only through this process of inquiry will we continue to seek wisdom; only through inquiry will we be able to know why the world works and what we should do about it. Only through inquiry will we generate the right questions and gain the knowledge to ask them in a way that Postman envisioned.
“I imagine a time” Postman concluded, “when we will have “wisdom sections” on broadcasts – places, times and spaces, not filled with meaningless and forgettable information, but filled with relevant questions about the stories that have been covered, questions directed at those who offer different bodies of knowledge from those which the stories themselves confront.” The cycle of questioning and knowledge building is wisdom. Let’s strive for Neil Postman’s brilliantly imagined time.