They Who'll Give Us Name

*Part of series of writings

Bruner's distinction was highly relevant with today's world cultural climate and environment. The particular knowledge I'm talking about in the last part was referring to 'literacy' or 'prior knowledge' that was somehow tacit and intangible. Now, in this part we'll examine our first idea about visual media, and how these days we can't escape the visual regime, thus forced us to be informed and taught by them. To my generation, our entire life was shaped by them, it was the visual regime who determine the extent to which something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be taken seriously in society.

But where does information acquired from social media could took us? It depends on how we treat the incoming information, how we transfer them to ourselves and what can we make out of it. It's too true that our social surrounding promises, above all, the experience of meaningfulness. Any information gathered from our experience in social engagements, shaped us into who we are, but that doesn't mean they can give you any identity. Yes, identity, as without it, we'll be flushed away in this world of demands and harsh fact. And identity was shaped through the means of information gathering, processing (or make it into knowledge), or to be short: learning.
(Remember, by learning here, I don't assume something like 'education'--I wouldn't need to forced out this point so heavily of how that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction, you can always read my rant in my other posts, hehe...) Learning and meanings, learning and identity, this sort of things were what will we discussed in this and next posts. Learning (that ended up in mastering), more than often--if it's not automatically--gave the practitioner an identity.

I have this one friend of mine who was identified as 'musician' among our friends, she was a pianist, and that social recognition given by the society for her amazing 'tacit knowledge' and ability in music, particularly the piano. The second example would be myself (hahaa) who was often identified among my friends as 'illustrator', 'designer' or anything that are related with visual art. One day, both of us (me and my friend the pianist), talked together. And from those talks, I recognized what Bruner's point in 'engage on activities' means. My friend talked heavily about how she shaped herself into an able pianist.

First, as an information gathering activities, she dived herself to musical theories, she submit herself to listened to many named composer and pianist, such as Rachmaninoff or Debussy, Bubi Chen or Herbie Hancock. These were taken as meaningful experiences for her, how she gather the information about music and musician, just the same as how I first interested in Herge's Tintin, Batman comics, or Disney's animation. I took them as information, I examined particular detail in Batman's shadowing, the dynamic movement in Tintin's comic panel, and/or coloring in Disney's animation. Our exploration, ended up in understanding, for we're not taking the information as something that was taken for granted. We consciously process them, not only remembering them.

The second part was meaning making, engage in the particular activity we loved to do. My friend, she then started to summon an instrument for herself: a piano. Learn to play it, compose a music out of it, practice it. The same as how I grab a pencil, make a doodle in my bedroom wall (and forced my father to repaint again and again the wall, haha, sorry dad!), before I start to moved on to paper. And what does the previous information gained for both of us? What good did music theories for my friend, and what good did shadowing and coloring did for me? It's good for expanding. Soon as my friend start to playing guitar and bass guitar, so do I can expand myself to oil paint and charcoal stick. For us, it's easy to move on from one instrument to another, for we're not taking it as our object of affection. We're not limiting ourselves to the instrument only, we learn the subject, and that's why the mediated tool never a problem for us--well, maybe there'll be a bit 'adaptation problem' at first, but as the proverb says, "these too will pass." Now that my friend can record himself in digital sound, transferred in PC speaker, so I can managed to handle Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Instruments are not the great emphasize, like my first idea how physical product doesn't guarantee instant literacy, it only 'help' us, it doesn't ‘make’ us.

The third was mastering and social recognition. It required us not to became indulgent practitioner, we need to contribute in society. My friend, she commit herself to the church choir, a band and any zeitgeist that supports them, while I bring my illustration in printed shirt for an organization, publication posters or promotional video. This is where we got those recognition. We make some implications to society, give them something out of us. We can meet up the society demand, for we--with our extensive learning--are prepared with the supply. We can transformed the information we gather to something 'real'. It took us beyond theory and concepts (no matter how I loved them), and encourage us, knowing that we were able, to contribute in society.

 

--TO BE CONTINUED--

Those Who Speak, Dwell In Darkness. Those Who Stay in Silence, Enlightened.

*Part of series of writings

The gap I'm talking about in the previous part of these writings was the distinction between 'know about' and 'know how'. Many people today misinterpret something about knowledge and information. They thought it was the very same thing, yet to be honest: it was totally different. Knowledge is something like 'tacit information', it became some sort of 'intangible' in our minds, while information it is merely a remembered facts or concepts acquired by our five senses. A physical products may guarantee you informational value, but not knowledge and deeper meanings. In simple, having a book, doesn't guarantee you understand what's in it, right? Okay, we began this part by asking what's something that knowledge catches but that information does not?

The distinction may not seems so obvious between knowledge and information, but one thing that act as a constituent for knowledge is this: process. Remember, not physical products, not the instrument that mediating them, it was the activities, the process that shaped it in. There are three distinctions that strike us as particularly interesting between knowledge and information.

1. Knowledge entails a knower, that is where people treat information as independent and more-or-less self sufficient, they seem more inclined to associate knowledge with someone, for example you may find information scattered around waiting to be picked up ("where can I find reliable sources on temperament theory?", "can I googled something about the new-released Seth Godin's book?"), but in knowledge, you may asked this particular question, "Who knows about that?"

 

2. Knowledge appears harder to detach than information, because people treat information as a self-contained substance. Information is something that people usually pick up, possess, pass around, put in database, lose, find, write down, accumulate, count, compare and so forth. Knowledge, in opposite, doesn't take as kindly to any ideas of shipping, receiving and quantification. Knowledge is hard to pick up and hard to transfer. You might expect, for example, someone to send you or point you to the information they have, but not to knowledge they have.
Take example: a painter might told something to their pupils or disciples how to correctly draw a geometrical shape like square or rectangle, but that was just information. Even when the painter held one of his pupil hand and guide him along the paper to make a circle shape, it is also an informational transfer, not knowledge. The knowledge, belongs only to the teacher, and was unlikely to be transferred to the pupil, for it was a very hard one.

 

3. Knowledge may be so hard to give and receive is that knowledge seems to require more and more by way of assimilation. Knowledge is something we digest than merely hold. Knowledge is something we eat and drink, not merely remember. Thus for a person to bear knowledge, it requires understanding and some degree of commitment. Says a researcher gather an experiment to measure out the relation between music and personality, he may publish the final result of his research as information for public uses, but the knowledge remains to him only, as the researcher, the one who conduct the experiment and commit himself to it. The public, who received information, and then commit to gather more sources about it, to some extent may digest this as knowledge too, but not in the same degree as the researcher does.

 

Jerome Bruner, a professor of Psychology in New York University, points out some clearer distinction between 'learning about' and 'learning to be'. Certainly, most of anyone's knowledge might best be described as knowledge "about." -- we may brag our rich collection of English Premiere League statistics, quantum physics, Darwinian evolution, indie rock music scene, and all, yet we are not soccer player like Rio Ferdinand, we're not physicist like Richard Feynman, we're not evolutionary palenteologist like Stephen Jay Gould, we're not musician like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. Something distinguish between us and them, and knowing something about Gibbard's personal life doesn't guarantee we can write music like him. Learning to be requires more than just information. It requires the ability to engage in practice in question.

 

--TO BE CONTINUED--