The epic of moving from information to knowledge

The American writer David Foster Wallace left as a legacy the following story: «Two young fish were swimming through the sea when they crossed with an older fish that did so in the opposite direction. When they reached each other, the older fish asked the youngsters: – Good morning. How’s the water today? – The younger ones didn’t answer him immediately and went on their way. After a while one of them turned to the other and asked him: «What is this about water?”

Those of us who were before the digital revolution grew up with the mantra that information was power. However, the arrival of the Internet with all its tools has socialized access to information. This is no longer something exclusive to a minority. In a few centuries, the doors of the libraries of abbeys and palaces have been opened, and universal access has been offered to anyone who wants to access this vast universe of knowledge.

Today’s society is not only characterized by the huge amount of information available, but also by the constant production of new content. Let us use this data to prove it: 90% of all the information available in the world has been created in the last two years.


Today’s society is not only characterized by the huge amount of information available, but also by the constant production of new content.


The fable of Foster Wallace’s fish is very representative of the present moment: not because we are immersed in a sea of information so we know more about the liquid that contains us. That is to say, we are overinformed, but not because of it better informed.

In my book «Actitud digital», I tell the anecdote of last year’s summer when we joined friends with their children to watch a moon eclipse. All the kids knew what time it started, that there wouldn’t be another one until certain years later, that the moon would look especially red, and so on. They knew all about this eclipse because the media had been treating it for days. The counterpoint was that none of them knew how to explain well why eclipses occurred. 

Information is constructed from data. It is enough to gather a series of evidences in an adequate way, without biases of any kind, to obtain a piece of information. Thus, for example, the data «root», «branch», «leaf», «fruit», lead me to «tree». From this moment on, every time I come across these evidences, I will conclude that I am in front of a tree.

Knowing what a tree is isn’t enough to throw us into the forest safely. The problem can come if my reference tree was an olive tree and now, I am facing an apple tree, or another one that does not have fruits, leaves or branches. Also, I will be vulnerable when someone shows me one made of papier-mâché and tries to convince me that this is a tree.

Today we are faced with a kind of informative obesity that, like food, has nothing good to offer. Accumulating data, either in isolation or as an informative whole, is as sterile as gathering thousands of pieces of Lego in a box; they will only collect dust and deprive you of a space that can be very useful for other things.

In order to overcome the limitations of data, it is necessary to do an additional exercise with the information they provide us with and to really put it into value: to turn it into knowledge.

As we have seen, our tree from the previous example has a very reduced utility. It is enough to modify one of its features to generate confusion and uncertainty. To the extent that we are able to go deeper into the tree category and explore its idiosyncrasy, a whole world of opportunities will open up for us, we will enter a new level of abstraction, that which allows us to manipulate the concept and create new realities around it: botany, for example.


In order to overcome the limitations of data, it is necessary to do an additional exercise with the information they provide us with and to really put it into value: to turn it into knowledge.


Those who know how to turn information into knowledge spend time building their own constructions with Lego’s pieces; they know how to create complex shapes and learn how to undo what is built before the arrival of new pieces and build more ambitious and stable structures.

This task is not always easy and requires a series of traits and skills that are not available to everyone. Not only do I mean having a enough intellectual resource, but I also speak of curiosity, motivation and critical reasoning.

The strategy of the network liars, the makers of the hoaxes, is precisely that, to take advantage of the inability of many people to move from orphaned information to unequivocal knowledge. Social networks throw out portions of Lego that are picked up by people who don’t know how to fit them in afterwards. They arbitrarily put together pieces of a different nature, some even pirates, and create abominable realities that move away from the noble spirit of knowledge.

The concern to go beyond the obvious must be instilled in the school. Children, in their formative process, must be stimulated to develop a special sensitivity towards exploration, towards higher knowledge. It is necessary to create non-conformist citizens, who are solved in the questions and dissatisfied in the answers.

If we analyse the prevailing educational model, it is easy to realize that in no case is this attitude promoted; on the contrary, the culture of data, of superficial information, is rewarded. It is the triumph of words over ideas.

Current education prioritizes automatic learning, repetitive, while the other of analysis, deductive reasoning, explorative is undervalued. To memorise all the books published by an author is nothing more than information of little use today, unconnected data. Thinking or reasoning is the essence of knowledge, a superior intellectual work that creates adults with criteria, impregnable to manipulation.

Now ask yourself, which is more likely to be answered by Siri or Alexa? Works by T. S. Eliot, for example, or the social scope of a journalistic tribune that talks about digital transformation?

This is the threat we face today, and we don’t seem to be able to glimpse it: our advantage over computers is the ability to reformulate reality, data or information from experience, intuition and one’s own judgement. Few things today are more challenging than learning by reading between the lines.

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