Blog post #5 How does the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge shape human societies and contribute to progress?

Hello everyone, this is my fifth blog post for my inquiry project, “How does the acquisition and the dissemination of knowledge shape human societies and contribute to progress?”

This is my third step of the research, about how the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge would contribute to progress in civilization and the overall development of humanity.

Although the acquisition of knowledge may seem to be the most important part of making the world a better place, the knowledge acquired will only make the world a better place if it is successfully spread and passed on by other people (4/5). Dissemination of knowledge shapes society by connecting individuals with other like-minded individuals to form a sense of community in society. When people have more information about other people, they will start to understand others better, for they now recognize the struggles that people have to face and recognize each other as human beings who have equally interesting and challenging lives. Moreover, this recognition of others would then allow for the barrier between people to come down, allowing people to form deeper and more genuine connections with people. This genuine bond that is created inside the community can sometimes last a lifetime, if not passed down to other generations as well. The action of exchanging knowledge, ideas, and perspectives with other people, increases the amount of creative innovations that are being created, due to the various perspectives and new ways of thinking that will be produced by just sharing culture and perspective (1). This is proven by the Information Age that we are in right now, we can share much information, culture, and perspectives with other people through the internet; however, despite the convenience of the internet, it is still lacking a crucial part of spreading information in HUMAN societies– HUMAN INTERACTION (2).
This leads to another point of mine: for information to be truly useful, it must be beyond just blank words and empty data; those things do not have meaning by themselves, and it is us who give them meaning through our choice of media. As we all learnt during the hard times of COVID-19, online learning is not nearly as effective and efficient as in-person learning, and a lot of us can barely remember what was being taught to us during the online lessons, because it is lacking in the human interaction part of learning. We do not want to spend hours of our precious life sharing knowledge with someone just for them to forget it in an hour, we have to add humanity to the words, to the raw data, and to the soulless information. Therefore, for the spreading of information to truly help society to develop and progress, the sharing of information must include learning through interacting with others(3).