From the Stone Age to the present day post-modern era, humanity has come a long way passing through the various epochs of ancient, medieval and the modern. Historians and management theorists alike call the present era by a fanciful name the knowledge age. Whatever that may mean the fact is that we also believe this to be an age where knowledge rules. And we have reasons, too, to believe in the old Baconian canon knowledge is power.
True, we have access to tonnes and tonnes of information. We have greater power to store and retrieve information. We have more information about natural phenomenon. All these have given a mistaken notion of invincibility and we are living in a make-believe world as we swim in an ocean of information. But wait a minute. Is this vast ocean of information really knowledgeIJ And in all sincerity, are we actually in the knowledge ageIJ We are sadly mistaken.
This is definitely the era of information, but that information is not power in itself. It can only be so if converted to knowledge. Moreover, knowledge in itself is not power. It is the right use of knowledge that is power. In information technology literature, they talk of giving one million typewriters to one million monkeys and find that chances of getting anything meaningful is still bleak. It is the ability to make knowledge out of information that is important.
But though getting the hypothesis right, we seem to be drawing the wrong conclusions. We keep on running after information, coining bombastic jargons like big data, data mining, cloud computing, fuzzy logic and even more. The logic, of course, is fuzzy — literally.
In these data-driven times, we need to realise that when data is in big demand, fly-by-night operators take advantage of this craze. Thus, the data gets fabricated, cooked, or manufactured and sold. The present era needs to be seen in this light. These are the times when everything can be bought and sold and as the materialists would like us to believe there are no free lunches. And why lunchesIJ Even water carries a price. In fact, people advocating a price for air also, that is nature’s gift. We are rather in the age of commerce.
Everything is commerce and commerce is everything. More so, information. look at the pointers of this age. The very nature of society has changed as everybody wants to make a quick buck. Without doing. Without deserving. So love has become transaction and relationships are investments to be giving returns later. For some sections of media, news is a product that is to be packaged and sold. Everyone is into business. Doctors and education, schools and hospitals, temples and religion.
Actually the marketers never had it so good. This age of commerce is driven by media that creates a need for everything; even things we don’t need. Rather, only the things that we don’t need. And we are buying those things as our reasoning has been blunted by the barrage of information. We have spurious products, adulterated food and motivated research. With just one objective: To enhance consumption. Unheeded consumption, unneeded consumption. The present times can be succinctly defined by those famous opening lines of Charles Dickens in his classic literary work A Tale of Two Cities: “These are the best of the times. These are the worst of the times.”
The writer is a professor of management and public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com