The Reader and External Knowledge

Robbie

Jun 30

What is more important, to have; a limited but growing amount of internal knowledge, or to have access to a vast and exponentially growing external source of information?

There certainly isn't anything wrong with having access to vast and exponentially growing sources of external knowledge. I know that you've even used these frequently perhaps even recently. Someone raises a topic or asks a question and you don't know the answer. So you open your phone in your pocket and Google it, or check Wikipedia. Equally, we increasingly inform ourselves about the ongoings of the world through social media. For a lot of topics that randomly appear in our conversation throughout life, we will be informed by snapshots, pithy remarks, two-minute video excerpts, and memes. There can be something good about this. We get a quick overview of many things. We don't have the time to look at it all. But we get a glimpse of a lot. There is a place for that.

But as to answering the question of importance, we should favour a limited but growing amount of internal knowledge. Compared to the information available and captured around the world, one person's knowledge is surely close to mathematically being zero. So perhaps it's strange to say that we should favour the limited amount of internal knowledge we have. But it's worth highlighting that external data is not knowledge. Information alone is not knowledge. And that's the key to the importance of internalised knowledge and why we should seek to grow it with a slow and steady approach.

Maryanne Wolfe puts it this way in her book, "Reader, Come Home", "The relationship between what we read and what we know will be fundamentally altered by too early and too great a reliance on external knowledge. We must be able to use our own knowledge base to grasp new information and interpret it with inference and critical analysis." (p.55)This last sentence I think is the key sentence. Having an internal knowledge base is how we interpret external knowledge sources. This interpretation is more discerning, more able to come to the truth of the matter, able to connect more data together (inferences), and able to critically analyse better if we have greater stores of internal knowledge.

Consider the opposite. Having little background knowledge, a smaller supply of internal knowledge, means we do not have the tools that are necessary for making inferences, deductions, and analogical thought (transferring meanings through analogies). If all that sounds a bit too abstract, consider your own lived experience of this matter. You've seen this play out already when people hold to a view that is obviously one-sided such as the fake news issues of our day, or something more complicated like politically polarised views. Maybe you've asked someone after they present a very charged opinion, "but have you actually read what that person said?" You get a very angry remark back which is hiding the sheepish and defensive, "No." This person has fallen prey to an "unadjudicated position". (p.56)

So how do we address this issue?

The solution isn't so much to read more. After all, we could simply spend more hours on social media reading the news headlines that the algorithm gives us, or we could read the taglines and memes. All of this is a mere superficial engagement. More of this kind of reading engagement is not going to help address the issue.

Rather, we should engage in what is called the "deep-reading process". And it's exactly as it sounds. Reading a book, reading a long-form essay. And then rereading, and then reading someone who proposes a different view on the subject at hand. If the problem is that we don't give ourselves enough time to slowly digest and assimilate new ideas into our internal knowledge base, then the solution will be the very uncomfortable and time-consuming practice of reading. Reading slowly. Reading deeply. Consciously reading. Reading with pauses. And doing all of this with others who are doing the same.

As Christians, we have the valuable resource of the church community. We have a community that we meet with regularly who can push us and challenge us. Likewise, you can push and challenge them. Sadly the church can all too easily fall prey to the problem we raised earlier, we can heavily rely on external sources of knowledge without deep engagement. Then we who are to be people of the truth can fall all too easily into misinformation, sketchy foundations, and poor thinking. This undermines our call to be disciples of truth. And so I should hope that we in particular are motivated to promote within ourselves and in our community good reading habits. Especially so because the world around us does not seem to value this kind of reading all that much.