“(Samuel Taylor) Coleridge described how his own child, then three years old, awoke during the night and called out to his mother. “Touch me, only touch me with your finger,” the young boy pleaded. The child’s mother was astonished.
‘Why?’ She asked.
‘I’m not here,’ the boy cried. ‘Touch me, Mother, so that I may be here.’”
– David Brooks, The Social Animal
Speaking from an individual perspective, information serves as the medium of self-learning and helps to interpret one’s social identity. As commonly known, people make judgment about their friends and acquaintances by gathering information through conversations and quality time spent together. During such public appearance, individuals learn from one another the appropriate protocol to fit into the community. Such watch-and-learn scheme can be traced back to early childhood education where infants imitate actions from their parents or caretakers persistently for learning purpose. All individuals go through such phase of imitation to learn to engage in social activities. For most people, information is the external source to build up their models of the world and understand everything. Like what Brooks mentions in his book, “information reaching us through our sense organs is selected and interpreted in terms of these [representational] models [we have of the world and of ourselves]” so that significance is evaluated and plans of action conceived and executed (Brooks, 2011). For individuals, to process information is the same as enriching empty minds and gaining experiences.
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