Imagine a telescope that is tasked with observing a certain distant exoplanet, named 27X. The telescope keeps gathering new data points every minute, and logs them in an internal database which is then studied by the scientists involved in the project.
The telescope can be seen as a primary source of data.
Research institutions around the world, microbiologists peering into their microscopes to study a new behaviour observed in a certain microorganism, sociologists studying cultural responses to a pandemic, mathematicians coming up with new variations of existing formulae to tackle a particularly difficult problem – people and instruments working at the absolute edge of human knowledge – these are all primary sources of data. It is when some new insight is derived from this data that they also become primary sources of information since they are telling the human species things we didn’t already know.
Most research institutions around the world share their research findings with the general public after a certain time gap. Indeed, some institutions share their data sets in real time even before someone from their team may have seen it, let alone extracted any new information from it. This has sometimes led to cases where people not in any way linked with the research team have managed to discover something merely by having access to that data. Primary sources of information, thus, lead to discoveries – mostly from the people immediately involved in the process that creates that information, but also, sometimes, from unrelated individuals who have, firstly, access to that data and, secondly, the ability to extract new information, and consequently new knowledge, from it.
Notice that the transition from data to information will not necessarily be a transition to “useful information”, insofar as their ability to expand our knowledge base is concerned. They shall, however, still be providing us new information in the sense made famous by Edison – they will still be telling us that “this particular thing doesn’t work”.
Distinct from, but complementary to, the set of primary sources of information is the set of information carriers which perform the equally crucial task of spreading the knowledge generated from the primary sources to the masses. These I refer to as the secondary sources of information. The secondary sources can be further sub-divided into many other levels, but we can skip that for the present discussion.
Thus, primary sources of information (for example telescopes), which keep logging new data, become repositories from which someone with expertise can sift through and make discoveries (for example that the rotation period of 27X is eight hours).
This discovery is then shared with the rest of the community through secondary sources of information – journals, conferences, educational videos, interviews and so on. Maybe it leads to the creation of a YouTube video where someone introduces 27X and tells the viewers about its properties. Maybe it leads to the creation of a meme – if you lived on 27X, you could have lived a life three times longer!
One subtle but very relevant difference between the two types of information is that while the repetitive consumption of primary sources of information can lead to the creation of new knowledge, secondary sources only ever provide new knowledge the first few times they are consumed. How?
Imagine I am a researcher looking at the data gathered about 27X. My efforts at gleaning new information from the text are dependent on the kind of knowledge base I already have – I will approach the data with a different mindset if my forte is statistical science, number theory, computer science or something else.
If I am a statistical scientist, I will probably think about plotting the values on a certain kind of graph and derive some information from it. I may even feel that I need a new skill (say, machine learning) to extract information in which case I might learn that new skill and then come back to wrestle with the data, maybe even deriving some new insight in the process!
This is because primary sources of information are created as black boxes – we don’t know what we might find in them.
Secondary sources of information, however, are derived from primary sources of information so there is clarity, at least, about what they are trying to convey, even if this process of conveying may lack quality or coherence. It may take me time to understand what they are saying, but once understood, I will not be able to learn anything more from it – they are not black boxes but fully transparent in what they represent. It may send me, and other consumers of that information, into flights of fancy, but then that will not create new knowledge in the species, only in that individual. If I am an astrophysicist, such a secondary source could even provide me ideas to, for example, change the direction in which I have pointed my telescope. So a secondary source could open avenues for creation of primary sources of information, but it cannot itself be a direct source of it.
YouTube has videos on a wide variety of topics. Let’s take, for example, a fairly specific category that has consistently ranked among the top trending categories online – cat videos.
Cat videos may provide us knowledge about cat behaviour, their attention spans, their curiosity, their social life and social structure, their anatomy, and other such things regarding their species, but they are unlikely to directly lead to a new discovery regarding them.
Primary sources of information exist at the absolute edge of human knowledge. Thus, they generally involve significant financial investment, people with deep domain knowledge and the results often take time to crystallise.
Secondary sources of information, on the other hand, exist in the daily lives of the people. It can be something as simple as a video I shoot from my phone or an article (like this) that I write – and which I then publish on my website. Secondary sources of information can be created by anyone, for they are nothing but derived works from the primary sources.
Thus, for an individual, it is far easier to create secondary sources of information than primary ones. You can pick up your smartphone to shoot and share a video and, voila! You have become a secondary source of information.
But if one wants to become a primary source of information, then firstly, one will need to display the talent and skill to be allowed access to both the technological and social machinery that is already involved in doing that work and, secondly, even if one has that talent a multitude of other reasons like financial status, social networking and ease of access could prove to be the deciding factors, either way.
In general, human beings are prone to errors when estimating the effort needed to attain something that is beyond their immediate reach, especially when it comes to something like attaining new skills or learning new things. So these hindrances, if they do arise, should not demotivate us from doing something we really want to do for there are two contrasting results that could happen.
It is possible that we end up spending our entire lives just trying to make that transition from being a secondary source of information to a primary one, but never manage to cross that line despite all our efforts. But in that case, when we are on our deathbed, we will be looking back at our lives not with regret, but with the satisfaction of having tried everything we could. In addition, we will be able to better appreciate the gravity or the difficulty of the problem we had undertaken, and will be able to assess our failures in a more pragmatic fashion. We will know how far we really were from being true sources of primary information.
However, the polar opposite can also happen. We could very well manage to make that transition and give to the world, to our species, and to that mutable fabric of human knowledge, something that wasn’t there before. We would have left our mark.
In either case, if you want to make the transition, the importance of trying cannot be over-emphasised.
So, what would you rather do – create new knowledge, or spread that which already exists?
What would you rather be? A creator, or a propagator?