People as the primary information context #

People touch it all: we are information beings, rooted in physical form #

We continue every day to add to our breadth of information and data. We accrue, aggregate, categorize, disseminate, connect, and ultimately try to find meaning and progress.

The vast majority of people are primarily interested in their own cognitive information architecture. We survive by it, by our leverage of it and the perceptive truth we’ve been able to wring out of it. It is the source of our physical, financial, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. 

More metaphorically, we survive better knowing to avoid tigers outright, how to manage tigers when we can’t avoid them, not being dismissed and laughed at for mistaking a domestic kitten for a tiger, and following our religious rituals and accepted meaningfulness of  how and when to apply the tigeryness symbolically and help us understand our tigery escapades.

Teaching our information is hit and miss for most of us. We rely on our processing chain, without being fully cognizant of all the pieces involved and when they are being applied. We get frustrated that an unquestioned aspect of our cognition isn’t even seen as part of another’s reality, and the teaching doesn’t spark. The teacher blames the learner, the learner blames the teacher, and everyone is frustrated.

We’ve come to depend on the hierarchical structure of our siloed learning disciplines: history, math, biology, etc. It helps us level-set the expectations and processing chains involved, provides reiteration so that a spark missed earlier might eventually catch. We leverage it consistently, even though it’s not the only way to impress learning. In so doing, we conveniently set aside that it intentionally left out what was “distracting” for the subject at hand. 

Forgetting there’s always more information is not something an information architect does; the data always rolls beyond the horizon. We have felt the agony of having set aside information and data to better balance with the goals at hand. We understand that too much information is as damaging as too little when we’re trying to make information available for a specific use.

Information is survival.

That’s the key, actually: information is survival. Sharing it helps more people survive. Sharing it helps disseminate the information that is getting ever closer to the quality of truth by allowing more minds to review and find gaps to fill, align with gaps they had already noted elsewhere, and discount it when it’s false — in other words, to add their perceptual truth. Holding information back assumes that some people are more worthy than others.

This is also the primary harm of misinformation and disinformation. Mis/dis-information skews minds, cognition, and understanding, and usually involves a strong emotion to help get it past the speedbump of critical thinking. It fits neatly in with existing cognitive biases, which can be very hard for people to see in themselves.