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--

What We Possess and What We Don't

*Part of series of writings

Let's looking back our life, what life experience could we collect? For today's standard, life experience came mostly from watching movies, TV, reading books, looking at magazines and advertisement, and browsing the net. Social media is practically everywhere right now. Everything we see, everywhere we look, there are always some neatly designed commercial billboards, beautifully packaged products, head-turning posters, and more. Unconsciously, they shaped our culture. Yes, our culture wasn't anything passed from the earlier generations: ours is shaped by media and their viral publication.

Bombarded with images of 'white is beauty', today's women shaped themselves towards the ideal, screened with advertisement of 'fat is for loser, skinny is sexy', the youth start to dieting themselves for no apparent reason (apart from 'being skinny just for the sake of skinny'). Even the self-proclaimed 'vintage' people knew the vintage culture from magazine, not a historical culture that's passed by their earlier generation.
Everyday tons and tons of visual imagery supplied to our eyes, the things that seems cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and opportunities, the dramatic story of successful person.

First, we dressed up with thick make ups and elegant outfits, then it continue and became a sort of habitual activities, the activities spread along a specific zeitgeist, forming a to-be-culture that's ready to unleashed themselves to greater institution like society. After the society had been successfully penetrated (by means of publications and socialization), the culture are established. Staying there for quite some time, before the media inject us again with another trend, another aesthetic value.

Everywhere we look: there's a new advertisement of the new Gucci products, new Apple releases, the success story of Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, the miraculous-dramatic story of rehabilitated junkie out of Oprah's talkshow. We were told to be like them, we were told to dig some deeper meanings behind those fabricated publication. We are mocked when we dress in some loin cloth when we went public, everyone laughed when we can't say a thing about Twitter. Today's media publication and company marketing shape our culture, minimize the gap between what's real and what's dreamy.

We were told to tucked in our shirt so that we can look like Katie Holmes, we are forced to buy those Zara clothes so that we may look like the people who bought them. Workers work hard to gain money and ended up spending in some Armani shoes and the new BlackBerry Bolt. Children looked up on PS3 advertisement and begged their father to buy one, teenage looked up Katy Perry's dress and hunt them in shopping mall, adults fooled by the new time-saving application in iPhone so that they can access their emails everywhere, and ended up buying them. And what happened when we can't buy those products? What happened when we failed to lived up the ideal images of 'white is beauty' or 'thin is sexy'? What happened when we didn't participate in some global warming prevention campaign? You get alienated, people looked down on you, they reject you.

The gaps are enormous, between what's real and what's not. Yet, today's corporation and media had eliminate every bound possible. Oceans and mountains, miles of roads and ricefields are eliminated, so that we here in Jakarta can looks like the people in New York, so that we can also plug a big headphone to our iPod Nano like everyone in Tokyo did. Visual imagery in every social media, well, to be honest it was a clandestine arrangement to globalize everything, socialize everything, make everything familiar and 'touchable', they even make the intangible could be grasped easily.

Here's when the invisible ideology took us in, forced us to conform with them. Yet, we never realized it, we never--consciously--knew what kind of ideology and belief they were all injected to us. We knew about the physical products, yet can't grasped the concept behind it, a concept of globalization, an idea to gather everyone under one roof. Knew something that physical products don't guarantee instant literacy, we possess a Blackberry yet we can't maximized the functions (says like, email features or voice recognition call), that's when the gap happened.

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