The Internet of Us (3 page)

What is amazing is not
that
this is happening, but
how
quickly
it is happening, how quickly we are settling in and accepting our new ways of being. That is particularly true, I think, with regard to our new practices of knowing. If anything, recent years have seen a rushing tide of enthusiasm. We've been told that the Internet has
been a force for undiluted knowledge expansion and democratization. Not only do we know more, but more people know. Our minds work faster, multitask more, and just plain get more stuff done.
¹⁰

William James famously said that once a current of thought like this starts to surge, there is little you can do. Trying to stop it is like planting a stick in a river, “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same.' ”
¹¹
He's got a point, but I endeavor to plant another stick in the river anyway—not because I am unhappy with my iPhone, or hostile to the growth of knowledge, but for a simpler reason. Acceptance without reflection is dangerous, and while our stick may not stop the flow, it can help us measure and assess its depth and direction. As the literary critic and writer Leon Wieseltier remarks, “every technology is used before it is completely understood.”
¹²
There is a lag time, and when we are living in the midst of a lag, that is precisely when we need to pay attention: before the river becomes settled in its course, something we take for granted as part of the natural landscape.

For another example, think about cars. The automobile remains an incredible invention. It increased autonomy, allowed for the distribution of goods and services into remote areas and driving one can be a lot of fun. But needless to say, our unthinking commitment to the technology—our willingness from early on to let it swamp other technologies, to treat it as having more value than other means of transportation—has had seriously negative consequences as well. The devaluing (at least in the United States) of public transportation systems like trains and the rise of carbon emissions and pollution are just the more obvious examples. In the United States especially, it has been difficult for us, as a culture, to come to grips with these problems. The technology has
become so embedded, so part of our form of life, that we have a hard time even noticing how dependent on it we really are.

In the same way, paying attention to our digital form of life—seeing it for what it is, both good and bad—is easier said than done. Forms of life are complicated and filled with contradictions. That's true of our emerging digital form of life too. We digital humans do have access to more information than ever before—whether or not we have neuromedia. But it is also true that in other respects we know less, that the walls of our digital life make real objective knowledge harder to come by, and that the Internet has promoted a more passive, more deferential way of knowing.
¹³
Like our imaginary neuromedians, we are in danger of depending too much on one way of accessing the world and letting our other senses dull.

Socrates on the Way to Larissa

Data is not the same thing as information. As the founding father of information theory, Claude Shannon, put it back in the 1940s, data signals are noisy, and if you want to filter out what's meaningful from those signals, you have to filter out at least some of that noise. For Shannon the noise was literal. His groundbreaking work concerned how to extract discernible information from the signals sent across telephone lines.
¹⁴
But the moral is entirely general: bits of code aren't themselves information; information is what we extract from those bits. They are the meaningful leftovers after we filter out the noise.

Yet not all information is good information; information alone still doesn't amount to knowledge. So, what is knowledge?

If you want to find out what anything really is—what knowledge
is, in this case—a really good way to begin is to ask why anyone should give a damn about it. Plato himself asked this question in a famous dialogue from the third century
bce
, where he imagines his teacher Socrates asking about why it matters that someone should know, rather than merely guess, directions to Larissa. Today as then, Larissa is a busy cultural and urban center, nestled in the mountainous Greek region of Thessaly. Legend had it that Achilles founded the city, and Hippocrates, the famous physician, supposedly died there. It was also the birthplace of the Greek general Meno—a man now more famous for having the starring role in this particular dialogue than any military victory.

Near the end of Plato's piece, Socrates asks Meno: Why does knowledge matter anyway? His questioning is pointed. In particular, he wants Meno to tell him why knowledge matters more than “true opinion.” After all, Socrates says, if I ask some passing stranger directions to Larissa, we'll get there as long as he has a true opinion about the matter—even if it is a lucky guess. I won't get there any faster by asking someone who really “knows” the answer—such as someone who has traveled there before. And that brings us to Socrates' inquiry: why does knowledge seem to matter so much since having accurate information can often get us to where we want to go? Meno fumbles about, and uncharacteristically, Socrates himself is quick to offer an answer in the form of a metaphor. Opinions without knowledge—even true ones—he says, are like the statues of Daedalus: so lifelike that they would get up and walk away if not tied to the ground. Knowledge, he seems to suggest, is true opinion that is tied down or grounded.

Plato's dialogue illustrates three simple points that are good to keep in mind when thinking about knowledge (what the
Greeks sometimes called
epistêmê
, from which we get the word epistemology, or the study of knowledge). It is worth getting these points out in front.

Knowing something is different from just having an opinion about it.
Any old fool can opine, but few can know. We might put this another way by saying that mere information or data isn't knowledge; information can be better or worse, accurate or inaccurate. When we want to know, we want the right or true information. But we also want something more.

Having accurate information still isn't enough to know either
. Making a lucky guess isn't the same as knowing. The lucky guesser doesn't have any ground or justification for his opinion, and as a result, he is not a
reliable
source of information on that topic. Ask him again tomorrow and he might guess something else. That's why his information is ultimately less valuable in most situations. When we want to know we want more than guesses; we want some sort of basis for trust.

What grounds our opinions or beliefs matters for action
. The old intelligence services adage is that knowledge is actionable information. Actionable information is information you can work with—that, in short, you can trust. Guesses are not actionable—even if they are lucky, precisely because they are
guesses
. What's actionable is what is justified, what has some ground.

So: whatever else it is, knowing is having a correct belief (getting it right, having a true opinion) that is grounded
or justified
, and which can therefore guide our action. Call this
the minimal definition of knowledge
.

The minimal definition of knowledge is helpful to a point. But like a lot of pithy definitions, it obscures as well as illuminates. In
particular, it passes over the fact that how a belief is grounded comes in different forms. Suppose I ask you the best way to get to Larissa and you give me the correct answer, not because you guess but because you have some grounds for it. There are lots of different ways that could happen. For example, you might:

Look at the map on your phone.

Recall how you got there last year.

Do both of these things but also explain why certain routes that look good on the map are actually slower because of localized road construction, etc.

All three of these points might allow you to know, but in different ways. They represent three different ways our opinions can be grounded, by being based on:

Reliable sources.

Experience or reasons that we possess.

A grasp of the big picture.