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Information Is Knowledge

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Information is not knowledge, merely one of the raw materials needed to obtain it. Just as a pile of bricks is not a house -even though bricks are the raw materials necessary to build it- a pile of data is not a doctoral thesis, not even a newspaper article, although information is also the raw material you need to write them.
Nobody in their right mind would mistake a house for a pile of bricks. However, this rather clumsy equivalence between something necessary –but not sufficient– to obtain an end in itself is often found in the public discourse on knowledge and information. This causes serious damage when understanding and managing the processes for acquiring knowledgeand assessing the capacity for action and communication between …show more content…

Because –for example– there is no point in having a high percentage of Internet connections if people go online only to play games, look at naked women, or do their shopping… This doesn’t mean that it is not important to have a high number of technologically well-connected users; quite the reverse: it allows a number of important things: e-mail, browsing web pages, important relationships over the social networks; it stimulates commerce, offers significant opportunities for learning, increases efficiency in official transactions, avoids travel… in addition to a long list of other advantages that of course include and imply easy access to information -to vast quantities of information. But none of the above is the same as having attained the knowledge society.
In a developed country like our own an important part of the population is already living in the information society, as it is relatively easy for them to obtain this information –the data– or to know where to get it (quite aside from the matter of the quality of that information; but for the sake of simplicity, let us forget this aspect -which is nonetheless far from trivial). Now, just as very few people know how to transform piles of bricks into houses, there are also very few people who know how to transform information into useful knowledge.
So what do we need to be able to arrive at

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