As a follow-up to the Wednesday discussion, in case you were interested.
Information: Information consists of observations that are recorded or gathered, but which don't mean anything until they are related to a system of knowledge. Think of Professor Steve's favorite example of the images on the York homepage - there's a picture of a windmill and one line of text says 'An environmentalist sees zero emissions' while another says 'A literature student sees Don Quixote'. The windmill is the information that has the potential to mean many different things. However, that potential is only realized in relation to a body of knowledge - like environmentalism or literature.
Knowledge: Knowledge is created within a system of discourse. For the purposes of our course discussion, knowledge should be understood as an ideological system that organizes the otherwise unintelligible information into something that is 1) meaningful and 2) always hegemonic. For example: Look at Hendrick's different periods of in the historical understanding of childhood. Each era used information about children (their ages, their ability to comprehend, their sexual and physical maturity, etc.) and made sense of that information by relating those observations to a pre-existing ideological system (Protestantism, Puritanism, psychoanalysis, science, etc.) in order to create a knowledge about children and childhood.
In summary:
*Information is never neutral because it's always embedded in a system of knowledge. However, it can reevaluated in relation to another system of knowledge. So while it is not neutral its value can change: we can't make the category of childhood meaningless, but we can change what childhood represents.
*Knowledge makes information meaningful, but systems of knowledge are always hegemonic. The cost of meaningfulness is that meaning is unequal: children are made to represent 'innocence' and 'purity' at the cost of their own agency and to the benefit of adults.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This certainly clears up the confusion between information and knowledge because it certainly seemed like knowledge and information had the tendency to overlap each other, thus, I figured it was harder to separate information from knowledge because information is, as you said, are information that are gathered, therefore it becomes knowledge only because we apply the information to a system of knowledge.
Because of your demonstration of both concepts, it certainly made it much more clearly. Thank you Neil!
Post a Comment