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Knowledge is made from information. In the past, information was held in scrolls and tablets and books and individual human brains scattered throughout society. Scholars, teachers, doctors, scientists, priests, philosophers and their ilk, were the only ones with access to this information.
Things are different now. Or at least potentially different.
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Now information is freely available and if we suffer from anything it is information over-load rather than information scarcity. The gate-keepers still exist but only because we still believe we need them. Today, even if you live in a remote corner of the planet you can probably get access to the internet and therefore find information on pretty much any subject. Some of it will be wrong – but so what – it was ever thus.
So now that the gate-keepers are redundant – we don’t need them any more – and we can pretty much find out anything we need to know to make our own informed decisions, we find ourselves in a place that humanity has never been before. The challenge here is to begin to find our way in this uncharted territory. Because it isn’t about information any more, anybody, anywhere can get that – now it’s about knowledge.
Now the challenge is learning to think so that all that information we can so easily access can be translated into knowledge. This democratization of information also means that everyone is both entitled and required to contribute to the generation and application of knowledge. There are no longer any obstacles to this – the only gate-keeper that remains as an obstacle for us to overcome, is our own belief that this is someone else’s job.
(1) John D. Rockefeller
