Is there a difference between intellectual resources and information when talking about the internet. To me the difference is very distinct and clear but others I have talked to about this see no distinction. Information is fine if you know what to do with it, access to an intellectual that knows what to do with information I see as the real resource. I have seen the question posed as to how can we tie all this information together, I see the better question as how can we connect the right intellectuals. Curious as to how this is approached in corporate circles or academia. There seems to be a growing movement on more effectively harnessing this thing.
I agree the two are very different. It stands out when people propose that there is little need for education if we have access to the web. Supposedly we can look up anything in seconds. This idea completely ignores knowing what to do with information, and in particular, knowing that there is something worthwhile to look up. You have to have information already in your head, and, you have to be capable of manipulating it, to recognize the usefulness of drawing on specific things.
For example, it appears hardwired into human brains at a very deep level to think in terms of analogy. It’s not just a rhetorical device, it’s actually how we deal with basic things. Animals that live in gravity generally need to understand up versus down at a pretty integral level. Apparently we then evolved to use the mental capacity for up and down to handle many other similar dichotomies, like big and small, good and bad, rich and poor, and even evolutionarily new concepts such as “higher” or “lower” voltage. We actually have brain circuits for up and down, and we engage them when thinking about an electrical circuit. Well, being able to bring analogy to bear in a given situation requires having the analogous phenomena already within our familiarity, and having some kind of sense of the analogy itself. How in the world could we make use of an analogy if we didn’t already have that internalized? The fact that we could in principle investigate some analogy online once somebody else suggests it in no way helps us think of it in the first place.
Wow, the fact that those things are all ultimately based on “up” and “down” is so obvious that it never even occurred to me. But thinking about it, concepts like “near” and “far” are just as good a match, and yet we would never refer to “near voltage” and “far voltage”.