It's getting interesting in cyberspace. One click on his Twitter account while at a hockey game, and Congressman Weiner's life, career and marriage will never be the same again.
Meanwhile 6 million Americans and 1.5 million Canadians recently quit Facebook in the space of just one month.
Guess some of us are learning the dangers of the digital world where oodles of data gets exchanged every second, but not much wisdom.
Tim Challies writes:
In the 1980s, Russell Ackoff, longtime professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, popularized what has since become known as the DIKW model, a model that aptly marks the progression from data to wisdom. Ackoff suggested the following progression:
Data — > Information — > Knowledge — > Wisdom
At the most basic level, we have data, which simply describes one or more symbols. A letter, an emoticon, a list of numbers within a spreadsheet—these are all data. They represent raw symbols and have no meaning outside of their context. As we collect data into a kind of cohesive whole we create information. Information answers basic questions about the data: the who, what, where, and when? Information is data that has been assigned some kind of relational connection or has some kind of meaning. If we add a heading to a list of numbers in a spreadsheet, we have made data into information; we have turned a list of numbers into a list of prices or ages or totals. We now know what these pieces of data are meant to represent.
When we collect, collate, and compare pieces of information, we have acquired knowledge. Knowledge makes information useful. A multiplication table is an example of knowledge, a table we can memorize that allows us to use information in a useful way so that we can always know that 2 times 2 equals 4 and 9 times 9 equals 81. Solomon’s proverbs, the hundreds of them listed from chapters 10 to 29 of his book—if we simply commit them to memory—are a form of knowledge. Knowledge is a “general awareness or possession of information, facts, ideas, truths, or principles.”2 Finally, when we use knowledge to make good decisions, when we apply facts and knowledge to life situations, we express wisdom. Wisdom combines knowledge with experience to live with virtue. Every day we encounter data, information, and knowledge, yet God calls us to live with wisdom.
Challies, Tim (2011). The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (p. 140). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
