Understanding Continuum
Absorbing
Context
Data
Doing
Information
Interacting
Knowledge
Reflecting
Researching
Wisdom
Context - weaving together or connection of words. Weaving parts into a whole so as to form a structure. - Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
Context shapes our perception and interpretation of meaning. All information, and knowledge that we have comes to us immersed in a variety of contexts. In order to understand or communicate meaning, we must attend to the contextual clues attached to each meaning.
Patterns and context are closely related. A pattern tends to create its own context rather than being context dependent to the same extent that information is.
Context normally comes in three forms:
- Explicit context is easily recognized, such as a letter or a book. Its "organization" easily stands out.
- Hidden context are subtle clues that we must learn to identify. It is often extremely hard to verbalize properly and may not be constant. It is often the most difficult attribute for understanding a concept.
- Presentation is how the data or information is arranged. Since this "organization" is conceptional, the presentation can create its own meaning or highlight it. Or as Marshall McLuhan was famous for saying "The medium is the message."
Although we need context to fully form our information, too much of it causes noise:
Even with the radio era in full swing, one's senses encountered nothing like the bombardment of images and sound that television would bring -- accelerated, flash-cut, disposable knowledge. For now, knowledge was scarce and therefore dear. It was the same for scientists. The currency of scientific information had not yet been devalued by excess. -- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
The context axis (see the "Understanding Continuum" chart above) has a beginning and an end:
- Gathering of parts: To form a structure or meaning, there must be parts. These parts are composed of bits of data. The only context in data, are other relationships with other bits of data.
- Connection of parts: To start giving meaning to the parts (data), we arrange them into a presentation, such as text or speech. Generally, the only context to information is its presentation.
- Formation of a whole: To become "whole," deeper contexts or "complexity" are added to it. This addition provides the person with experience. Thus, knowledge is gained through experience.
- Joining of wholes: Wisdom has a number or "wholes" or "patterns." These patterns allow the person to join the various "wholes" that can be used in novel ways.
Thus, if you do not gather enough "parts", you have nonsense. And too many "parts" coming in at once create noise.