What Can We Do?

Following Knowledge > Information

Act.

The message of Knowledge > Information is that we should be more conscious in order to not get drown in the world of information that carries no knowledge.

The action item for us is to simply take conscious action.

Starting from ourselves, which always is the first step.

The “supply” part of the market of content creation will follow the “demand” part of what do we consume. And the demand is what we control.

The single most efficient way is to stop consuming.

• Configure your gadgets.
  Make sure your inbox is not under constant marketing attacks.
  Turning notifications off helps a lot as well.
• Don’t leave comments anywhere except the places you feel welcome.
  Otherwise the “Someone is wrong on the Internet!” daemon will haunt you.
• Don’t spend time reading and sharing posts and articles with new information but no new knowledge.
  And consider unfollowing those who specialize on spreading that type of content around.
• Show sympathy to the services that choose to fight the uphill battle of content quality vs. quantity.
  Yes, as I was writing before, Medium is not perfect.
  But they at least try.
  In the world of marketing overruling common sense, this alone is worth rewarding.
• Develop a reflex of not cooperating with aggressive ways to steal your and your friends’ attention.
  Pop-ups are evil.
  Share buttons are evil.
  “Login to Read More” is among the worst of it.
  Don’t cooperate. It’s not worth it.
• Ignore spam you can not stop.
  Often times, the single best thing one can do is to not let external events affect us. It works with unwanted inbound communication as well.
• Surround yourself with like-minded people.
  With those who, as you, are allergic to information without knowledge.

It only took a month to make my Facebook a place for interesting conversations.

Which has been among the best time investments I have made in the past year.

Now, on Facebook, with my online and offline friends, we discuss entrepreneurship, products and software architecture. Whenever I have a question that is worth asking a good friend offline, I can count on Facebook community lending a hand.

Ah, and don’t hesitate to mentally label more forms of information as spam!

Zen would be “It has no knowledge, hence I don’t let it distract me”.

As human beings, we will evolve.

Raising and educating kids as part of the society has long ago displaced barbarian forms of gathering into tribes united by same primitive instincts.

Similarly, we will develop the need for useful knowledge and the allergy to useless information.

I hope to see this happening within my lifetime. And would be delighted to use your help.