Posted by Mezei on March 16, 1998 at 22:13:23:

In Reply to: Re: On Sense, Sensibility and Nonsense posted by Craig Maudlin on March 16, 1998 at 15:18:47:

Hi Craig

This is how I think it works: there is human and tehnological processes which combine to route data, information, and knowledge across (or throughout) an organization. So two forces are at work - human and technological. Now, within this framework of taci (human) and explicit (tech), we can determine what exactly characterizes knowledge, what characterizes information, and what characterizes data.

You see, what we have is a spectrum. Knowledge can only exist within the human medium. Information is not the same as knowledge in that when a human 'interfaces' with a computer or book or other piece of technology, what is exchanged is something removed from knowledge, a less contextual form of communication called info. Finally, data is something that only exists in storage. This is a bit of a paradox, but I might suggest that we are only aware of data by its absense. In other words, when we retrieve data, we are converting it into the medium of information. When we store it again, it reverts back to data.

The thing is, when we communicate between individuals, there is a tacit and explicit form of communication going on that can't be replicated by machine. Information is not tacit/explicit, but rather is 'animate' and 'inanimate'. These latter distinctions better characterize the medium of information. Finally, data is an 'on/off' state, an input/ouput process that has very little grey area. But in the final analysis, the question must be, why call anything info and data? Should knowledge suffice for all descriptions? We could argue that data is a subset of information, which in turn is a subset of knowledge, so everything stems from knowledge. This also explains why we confuse descriptions of things - is it data etc. So my original point is that the medium 'describes' the message. If a thought is communicated on a human level, then we can consider its full import to be knowledge. If that same thought is transcribed into a computer (like this message on Brint), it enters the classification of information. When it's stored in the hardware of Brint's ISP, it's data. When you read it off the screen, its info, and when you think about it or talk to someone else about it, it becomes knowledge.

Don

---

Follow Ups:

• Re: Hearing poetry, reading poetry, and storing poetry are different medias with different meanings... Craig Maudlin 11:55:35 3/17/98 (0)

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: