In his article “Of Ideas and Data”, Theodore Roszak suggests that ideas are the
foundation of the information. Information comes from ideas and cannot be
independent from ideas. In Rosazk’s argument, the new media technology like
computers is obviously convenient to our lives in the way it processes the fast
sundry information. However, it can blur the distinction between the accuracy
of the online information and reliability of our own thoughts. Rosazk claims
the importance of the ideas from two main aspects. One is that ideas always
come first than information for “ the mind thinks with ideas, not with
information.” (P.283) The other one is
that “ideas create information” (P.286) and there will be no information
without ideas.
In his first claim, Roszak points out an
interesting concept called generalization, which is the relationship of ideas
to information. He defines it as “the basic action of intelligence”(P.284),
which will appear in two situations. First, when we face to deal with sundry
disordered facts, our mind should try to find the link among them and to figure
out the relevance. Second, if the proffered facts are infrequent, our mind should
enrich them and find the pattern of conclusion.
In a word, generalization is a good practice to help us gather an
inadequate idea to a more persuasive one. In addition, generalization can take
place “among many densely packed and obvious facts” (P.284) or “on the nature
of a guess or hunch” (P.284) Generalization seems limits the abundance
of the information and concentrates it. However, ideas can be more unstable and
controversial. Roszak uses the example of Gestalt figure to explain the
relationship between facts and ideas. According to him, ideas gather the
scattered, ambiguous facts to one direction and satisfy the questionable minds.
Therefore, so-called information is the actually the creation of the ideas.
In his second claim, Roszak reiterates and
emphasizes that ideas create information by using the example of the concept
of time. Moreover, he argues the negative effect of confound of ideas and
information. If we set the information instead ideas as the standard, there can appear many mistakes. Since update
of ideas can usually overthrow the old information, it is very important to remember
that without ideas, there will be no information can be constructed.
This is a pretty interesting, but maybe a
little bit abstract article. I personally enjoy reading it. So what do you
think about the article? Do you agree with the idea that ideas create
information? How do you treat the information you absorb online? Do you
completely believe it? Or do you sometimes query it? What’s your opinion for
the concept of generalization? Will it help us to learn the information faster
or maybe kill your creation? What’s your
personally ideas about ideas and informations?
I tend to agree with Roszak. If people never thought for themselves, and challenged the concepts that were laid in place before their time, the progress of humans the the progress of information would have never been. For all we know, time travel is impossible. Until someone breaks the space-time continuum and figures out a way to move about the timeline, we will continue to believe that time travel is impossible. But that is only because we don't possess enough information to support that claim. Five hundred years ago, a make-believe landscape that is only accessible via "wi fi" connection and a robot-like machine would be considered preposterous. Well, here we are today, with the Internet. These examples illustrate how ideas have the potential to change the world as we know it. They inspire us, and are the basis of all information.
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ReplyDeleteI was actually somewhat annoyed reading this article. Roszak strikes me as a narrow-minded and biased man, but that's just me speaking of him at a glance, so let me back up a little.
ReplyDeleteThere's a point, as you mentioned where he mentions that Information comes from Ideas, and that Information can never create ideas. Straight forward, right? Well hold on just a second, because on page 283 in the final paragraph Roszak says "Ideas come first because ideas define, CONTAIN, and and eventually produce information." Notice that awesome seventh word that I so helpfully capitalized? Here Roszak implies that Information helps make up ideas, and later he refutes that by stating that Information cannot contain ideas. His statements are contradictory, and nothing annoys me like that.
So what do I think? I believe it's a two-way street. Our world, our universe, our very existence is made up of facts and information, even if we haven't yet discovered it all, but ideas can lead to the discovery or even creation of more information. It's impossible to find the start of this cycle, and I think it's rather pompous for Roszak to believe that he can single out an Idea as the more important of the two.
One cannot exist without the other, both are equally important. To put down the importance of one also lessens the impact of the other, and Roszak doing that was what really ticked me off for the entirety of the article.
Little typo there at the end of paragraph two, let me re-type that here:
DeleteThere's a point, as you mentioned where he mentions that Information comes from Ideas, and that Information can never create ideas. Straight forward, right? Well hold on just a second, because on page 283 in the final paragraph Roszak says "Ideas come first because ideas define, CONTAIN, and and eventually produce information." Notice that awesome seventh word that I so helpfully capitalized? Here Roszak implies that Information helps make up ideas, and later he refutes that by stating that ideas cannot be made up of information. His statements are contradictory, and nothing annoys me like that.
I agree with Jack- not so much that I was annoyed, but I felt very much like this was a "which came first: the chicken or the egg" kind of thing. Facts help shape and form ideas; ideas can be the beginning of what later becomes fact.
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