## 4 Conclusions: Media Ecology's Implications for \"the Information Age\"
### Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom in the Context of Media Ecology  
[PERSON]'s poetic linking of _information_ to _knowledge_ and _wisdom_ set off a flurry of speculation on the relationships between these three concepts (as well as others, e.g., data) that I do not intend to take up here. I do wish to note that I have emphasized the concept of information in the discussions leading up to this point, and have not been especially concerned with the distinguishing it from those of knowledge and wisdom. But by way of conclusion, I would suggest that the relationships between the three can be properly contextualized within the field of media ecology. Wisdom is a characteristic of the human person, whether it is regarded as an innate sensitivity and intelligence, or a product of hard won experience. Wisdom is an understanding of relationships, of relationships among people, of people's relationships with their environment, and of one's relationship to oneself. And I would argue that wisdom is intimately associated with nonliterate, oral culture and the media environment with which it is associated. Speech cannot be separated from the speaker, and memory cannot be separated from the persons who remember and commemorate. As [PERSON] explains, in an oral culture, you can only know what you can recall, and if you cannot bring it readily to mind, in what sense do you really know it? Words of wisdom, in a traditional sense, later to be collected and referred to as wisdom literature, are proverbs, mnemonically formed sayings and aphorisms [22].  
Writing, on the other hand, in separating the knower from the known [81], turning a process, a verb, _knowing_, into a thing, a noun, _knowledge_. Knowledge becomes something that you find in a book, that you look up when you need to know something. And whereas wisdom involves understanding relationships, which is to say that it operates on the medium or relationship level, knowledge is about content, and works on the content level. Note that wisdom does not disappear when writing appears, and neither does speech after all. But the characteristic of wisdom becomes more distant the more fully immersed we are in literate culture, more mysterious and elusive. We look for it in books, but there we find only knowledge. And in tying knowledge to writing and literacy, I do not mean to imply that knowledge does not exist in oral cultures, but simply that there is no such thing as a _body_ of knowledge, there is only knowhow, the practical ability to do things, which can be learned as an activity, and that includes the ability to remember and recite. The only body of knowledge is the human body, and as [PERSON] notes, this is symbolized by the fact that we talk about learning things _by heart_[82].  
If wisdom resides in the person, and knowledge in a book, where do we find information? In signals transmitted through wires and airwaves, bouncing off of satellites, stored on magnetic and optical media, in computer memory and databanks. Knowledge takes time to acquire, and wisdom is the fruit of a lifetime, but information appears instantaneously, dematerialized and decontextualized, its function to reduce freedom and establish control. While popular discourse treats information as a basic human need and an unmitigated good, media ecology scholars warn that its benefits do not come without costs, and have expressed concerned about the devaluation and loss of human judgment, and liberty. The danger is in an unbalanced media environment where knowledge becomes the property of the privileged few rather than of the population as a whole, and wisdom all but disappears in the noise and clutter of information overload. At the same time, our new information technologies do have the potential for helping us achieve a more complex and ecologically sound social system, one where information serves human needs and purposes, and is used to create a sustainable and humane environment. The potential is there, if information can be harnessed through knowledge, and if it can be applied with wisdom.