On Tuesday night I went to a debate as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, entitled “Is the internet making us smarter?”, by the kind invitation of Suzanne Doyle-Morris.
Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life and our gracious Chair, introduced the speakers: Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist; Emily Bell, director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; and Dr Aric Sigman, Health Education lecturer.
You can read the full write-up from Tim’s colleagues, but I want to pick out a few comments that set me thinking about an Open Knowledge perspective (so please bear in mind these quotations are taken out of context!):
- “Access to information is invaluable“, said Tom. Our Open Access Working Group has been promoting access to research data and literature for a long time, and Peter Murray-Rust has been reporting on the struggles around this on his blog recently;
- Tom also said the internet makes us smarter because, “People with ideas are coming together” to share their ideas and collaborate – this is the basis upon which our network is built and is growing, in Working Groups and Local Groups…
- …And Emily made the point that, “Connectivity on the internet means progress“, which reasserts this;
- As well as Emily’s brilliant term ‘anecdata’, ‘innovation is ideas having sex’ was a phrase that stuck with me mainly because it tickled my sense of humour! (Tom did attribute that to Matt Ridley – apparently it’s actually quite a serious notion. Really);
- Aric noted that we need to discern information offered to us, saying that it is usual to be sceptical about research into sweets funded by a sugar production company but most data about the internet is provided by computing coorporations. This put me in mind of the efforts of our Open Science Working Group, seeking to make public the funding organisations behind research papers;
- Aric stated that, “Information is not knowledge“. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a “global movement to open up knowledge around the world and see it used and useful” – there is so much information on the internet we don’t know where to start, but information becomes knowledge when it becomes useful to people.
So, these three speakers had three different approaches to the ifs, hows and whys the internet is making us smarter, but were united on the importance of collaborating around ideas and sharing knowledge.
Other points that interested me from a knowledge-sharing perspective are:
- Research into untaught learning through resources made available to children (cited by an audience member);
- The ash die-back crowd-sourcing computer game from BBSRC (cited by an audience member);
- The effect of social media on political uprisings [no link as no one source - search for it, there's loads of information and opinion available] (cited by an audience member);
- And (from Tom Standage) Cows To Kilowatts!
One final point: Aric commented that (in the context of being wary of some people hoarding information and others not being able to access) we may end up with, “Information serfs tilling their data”, which put me in mind of Rufus Pollock’s throw-away comment at last month’s Summit that [paraphrasing] we shouldn’t aim to ‘all be in our own little data gardens’… Here’s to open – and fertile – knowledge!
