- Joanna Cruz
- Ridgewood, NY
- United States
Student , The Cooper Union For The Advancement of Science and Art
This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »
Would you rather be an information producer, propagator, or consumer?
In my Bioelectricity class this week, we talked about the propagation of electrical signals in the body. We learned that sensory cells and neurons act like information "producers." As sensory cells in the eye, ear, nose, tongue and body generate the electric signals that stimulate neurons, "information" is produced by the body! This information is then transmitted in the form of action potentials (or "spikes") along myelinated axons which act as "information propagators" as they efficiently and rapidly distribute these signals. These signals may be received by the dendrites of other neurons which act as receivers, or "consumers" of the action potentials.
Learning this material has inspired me to ask: how can biology inspire us as we disseminate "ideas worth spreading?” or as we consider our roles as information producers, information propagators, or an information consumers? How can we best help propagate worthy and novel ideas?
Harnsowl Ko 50+
Yawa Hansen-Quao 20+
Samantha Massengill 50+
Scott Armstrong 50+
The best ideas seem to be most enthusiastically shared between people that know each other and most effectively (it seems to me) face to face.
Perhaps, despite ideas now being able to go global so quickly, a message is sometimes best conveyed in the traditional manner..
Jordan Kannon
Manue M 10+
Being only one of the three is in my opinion useless, unhealthy or dangerous.
For example just sitting all day long in front of a tv is unhealthy. Propagating an idea that you have not produced and that you have not been making researches on, by consuming other people researches is clearly dangerous if you are charismatic. Producing information without feeding yourself from what others have done before is very pretentious and you usually end up doing something that has already been done.
So to help propagate worthy and novel ideas, we need, in my opinion, to be critical consumers, then, appropriate ourself ethical ideas depending on who you are, what the world is now, and then if we can also modify good ideas to make them better, create variation or turn them in brilliant ideas, that is even greater!
James McGuiness
Over the rest of this century we should be knocking ourselves out to push the remnants of the first generation of "web content" off the edge of the "flat Earth" because we have been primitive thinkers and users of a technological whole whose potential is far greater than we have seemed to gauge. Cyberspace is the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and we the apes making a cacophony of noise trying to figure it it opens up some how and lets us in. Has anyone asked if the monolith is organic? Is it alive? If we can answer that much, we can start growing towards what it is. But if we ask only how we can "disseminate" ideas, we grovel for the bigger bone to knock each other over the head.
Sophie Rand 50+
Teaching, which is a form of information producing and propagating, is necessarily learning teachers must understand a subject from so many aspects to be able to effectively teach to various learning styles.
We are all information producers due to the internet-- for example google tracks all the moves we make, and our decisions on the internet to search things or look up things is a piece of information that is used to understand what people are looking at, interested in, likely to buy, etc..
Robert Quinn
Thank you and I hope this helped a bit? It is very hard to form sentences from these abstract concepts.
Jose Lopez
One way to deepen this discussion is to look at specific types of information, like scientific research, product designs or news stories. I am particularly interested in news because virtually anyone can be a citizen journalist given the right dose of will and resourcefulness. Should we doing more as individuals to find and broadcast the stories around us?
Yu-An Chen 50+
I like how you thinking about specifying the types of information. For scientific research, I think everyone is a consumer and a propagator but it does not apply to producer. Before becoming a producer, one has to be absorb enough information(being a consumer) and then have some thought of ones own and willing to share(being a propagator) and finally generating products(being a producer). As a student which I see as a consumer, I feel the more information I consume, the harder it is to become a producer given how advanced the technology has become today
Jose Lopez
The Open Science movement also blurs the line between producers and consumers, because it gives non-experts a chance to contribute nuggets of genuine insight and innovation. So far our two best proofs of concept are the Polymath Project (proving a math theorem on an open blog) and Foldit (citizens playing a video game that identifies protein structures). It will be exciting to see what sort of progress emerges from these types of efforts. More on Open Science from a TEDster: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_nielsen_open_science_now.html
Edy Sargert
I like this conversation so keep asking!
Reilus Heliodromus
João Miguel Sousa
Creation, innovation and creativity i believe it focus on the way we recognize and understand the significative diferences. A study in talent shows that in 200 teachers of various domains when asked to evaluate the talent of the autors, from 11 works, mixing famous colective art with outsider art (low QI) they couldn't tell the difference and won one of the outsider art works. That show us that everyone can be creative. Thank u all 4 the debate
Julien Bayle
nice topic!
I think we all tend to become producer.
Today, social media transformed everyone into a little producer of data, or a bigger one.
It reminds me the Zawinski's law about the softwares which said:
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
Fortunately, we wouldn't be replaced ourself, but finally, it is the same concept for people.
We all tend to become producer progressively after to have been only consumer, then a bit propagator.
It is like a unspeciation, I mean, we are becoming less dedicated but more global in our social behaviour.
Niaz Uddin Sohel
Debaprasad Kittu Mukherjee
fb.com/dpkm235
-Deb
Debaprasad Kittu Mukherjee
The reason I am more comfortable with consumption is probably because I feel fascinated by everything, and thus cannot probably stick to one or two things. Sticking to a thing or two is probably necessary for creation. I find it also easy to propagate/communicate because I remain fascinated by what I consume, and thus remain in the urge to infect others with that fascination.
I propose here a simple model of the world/society where one third produce/create, one third propagate/communicate, and the remaining third consume/comprehend. This model (division of labor) may be interpreted to be based on complex network/complexity, since we need minimum of three o the other t(A, B & C) nodes to get a "closed" system, and if each node is complementary two, the system would survive (evolve with stability).
Fanciful thinking, but food for some. :)
Deb
Andrew Kiang 50+
Of course, being only a consumer is not really helpful to humanity in creating new ideas. I think it is a great that you are propagating the information you consume to others while actually enjoying doing so. In fact, you even support information creation by overseeing it. This shows that even if one does not want to be a creator that they can still support producing meaningfully.
Sang Qiu
David Bismark 200+
This is something I've been going through for the past few years. I've started to be conscious about what I read and when there is something that fits into MY puzzle, that gives ME an insight, I use Evernote to save that information, the blog post or just the idea for later. I also tend to share these things on Facebook and Twitter.
Mary M. 50+
So tell me, because I have been following this conversation for a couple of days....my first instinct was to say I am ALL THREE.......would this be possible?
I appreciate your insight David. Thanks.
David Bismark 200+
Bernd Fesel 30+
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Hugo Lepetit
- deleting : some of the information received is forgotten, considered as not important and thus discarded.
- distortion : some of the information received is modified in order to stick to a more familiar model we know of.
- generalization : some properties of a part of the information is extended to some other or all the pieces of the data.
When it comes to manipulating information, our first reflex is to simplify it in a way that it is easier to manipulate for us and us only. Other people might simplify it in other ways. The map is not the reality.
Simplified information is faster to proceed with for our brains and easier to link to the collection of data our brains already know about. We learn new things by linking them to what we already know or have experienced. Information has no interest if we cannot learn from this, thus linking is essential.
Context is often more important than raw information.
Would people rather be producer, propagator or consumer ?
I would say that people will just answer to the data they receive in their own personal way :
- producing information if they need something that they don't know of already
- propagating if they think the idea is worth spreading and added value to their understanding of the world or their lives for example though it might be for social proof purpose.
- consuming so people can think of the next move in their lives be it adding some salt to their food or applying for a job.
We all do the three things and choose what to do at the moment given our personal context and experience.
David Bismark 200+
Comment deleted
João Miguel Sousa
vince vernile
But I have to ask : Why must the roles of information producer, propagator and consumers be defined and separate(d)?
Wouldn't a 'blending' of these roles be far more effective, in conveying ideas, and possibly a further step towards the quantum level of understanding that we seem to be aiming towards, in our technology?
João Miguel Sousa
They serve the purpose of social organization and it's an enhanced way of useful preconceptions. When asked "who are you?" most say "i am my job" ou "i am what i'm doing at the moment" both in a understandable social role that flows our communication". The real discovery reflects in the way we can expose ourselves as we really are beyond social roles. About preconceptions, the first people had to have a cognitive alert about the savage environment. And we use estereoptypes all the time. Usually in distorted manner.I believe that's why today, many choose to look beyond gender, race and religious beliefs not because they where habit but because we want something more from each individual.
David Bismark 200+
Veronica Shalotenko 50+
I agree that in an ideal situation, every person would consume, produce, and propagate information. However, in my opinion, today there are a lot more information consumers and propagators than producers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though; perhaps, this is just a natural balance. I recently watched a very interesting TED talk by VS Ramachandran (The neurons that shaped a civilization). He argues that there is a scientific reason for humans’ tendency to consume and propagate information. That is, we’re naturally “programmed” to consume and propagate, but not necessarily to produce. Ramachandran discusses the so-called “mirror” neurons, whose primary function is to allow us to mimic the behavior of others. Perhaps, one day, humans will possess some sort of “production neuron” that will make the production of information as natural as consumption and propagation.
Matthew Wieder 50+
Andrew Leader 50+
I think that many actions actually fall under more than one of these categories--or in other words, you often times do two at the same time, out of necessity or otherwise. For example, I think that producing information well takes an extraordinary talent for consuming information. As science and technology become more advanced, fewer and fewer discoveries are made outside of the context of other contemporary discoveries. Consider Einstein, perhaps one of mankind's most popular information producers, a man who is often considered to have been an academic outsider. Although his ideas were original, he was fully aware of the achievements of his contemporaries, and he studied them. In other words, his discoveries did not come out of a vacuum.
This is just one example. I tend to think, in general, that putting energy into any three of the activities we've been discussing makes you better at the other two.
Maria Georgescu 50+
Heather Ganshorn
David Bismark 200+
Heather Ganshorn
Walther Maratuech
Edy Sargert
Anyone else interested in this dialogue?
Anne Stanton
David Bismark 200+
Andrew Tam
I see what you are saying about the 'whole' being just a 'node.' However, it seems like 'importance' is relative to the reference frame through which we are looking. At the individual level, the decisions we make seem important, as these impact all of the people around us.
With something like evolution, its hard to consider just one persons' contribution. Evolution occurs over hundreds of thousands of years. At this order of magnitude, it just seems more natural to group humans together. Their actions as a whole seem to be what impact the human race and its direction.
Importance just seems relative to the group we are examining; I don't think it can be defined universally.
Anne Stanton
David Bismark 200+
Roy, I might have corrected your "Mr Bismark" and said "It's actually Dr Bismark". But I consider my own achievements and my own understanding of the world small, random and inconsequential. It is my part in the network as a whole that makes me important.
I am mortal and I will one day perish. Therefore, I consider myself valuable (to myself at least!) for only the brief period that I can work on this earth - but I consider the evolution and learning of the human race to be eternal and thus more important than myself.
In the analogy of the human race being a giant brain, or human network, I as an individual, provide only a miniscule proportion of the total computing power and a tiny bit of the total memory. It is more important to the human race that there is diversity than it is to it that one individual, me, is around.
To the individual, me, being alive is paramount, of course.
Edy Sargert
Anne Stanton
Sorry! Lots of questions, but I am trying to improve the info flow between us (lol). I feel this is very relevant to the original question "How can we best help propagate worthy and novel ideas?"
Chandru Shamdasani
João Miguel Sousa
How can biology inspire us as we disseminate "ideas worth spreading?
I believe that the biological approach is not the best way to understand the definition of ideas. In psychology, we learned that meaning is something that is learned by behavioral observation, in Bolwby, and by signs/simbols that we choose to be the expressions of our culture. We value money, time, everything. The totems in Freud. This is the facet of the idea. Biology is the realm of biological understanding of nature.
As we consider our roles as information producers, information propagators, or an information consumers?
I believe all the roles have a possibility. I believe we understand that we live in a social society in a sense that we choose not live in a monastry in touch with divinity inside or outside of us. We live in a society that relishes in workdays, family bussines, choosing the best knife to prepare the most romantic dinner. It's our behavior that fills the role that society choose to us.
How can we best help propagate worthy and novel ideas?
The best way to propagate worthy and novel ideas is to use creativetly technic knowledge in a certain domain, give meaning to the idea and aiming ecologicaly and inclusively in the positive consequences of the idea.
I
Anne Stanton
vince vernile
Anne Stanton
vince vernile