Straightforward Thoughts - Antonio Hallage

Transforming information into knowledge and action We are being bombarded every day more and more, by a torrent of information.

One of the great challenges of our time is to discriminate the information than can be useful to us, transform them into knowledge that in turn will be the foundations to help us to take decisions or to produce concrete, positive and useful actions.

It should be included on this process the accuracy of the critical sense of the human being that no computer can overcome, of the selection of which information will be transformed into knowledge and which should be discarded.

The Global Network generated by the Internet, and its most recent successors which are the social media, allow us to have access to an endless data base, democratizing the information. The appearance of the Internet in this aspect can be compared to the first Bible printed

by Guttenberg, which in times of great religion syncretism, democratized the content of this holly book, making it available to be read inside homes and not only in the interior of monasteries.

We are exposed to a risk to see our discernment be clouded by the excess of information to which we are exposed and that comes within our reach, blunting our senses and turning it more difficult our evaluation of what is relevant.

The anxiety for information should be minimized and we should put some discipline in dealing with information to transform it in something that will result in a learning process. The information need 174