The Internet Mode of Thinking |
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| Let us now
swerve a little from the main course of this site. We
will pose a question and ask you to turn your attention
inside-out and look into yourself: Monitor your thoughts
for a while before reading on. Here is the question:
Where will your next shopping tour take you to? Continue |
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| What happened? When we do „experiments“ of this kind, there usually crop up a number of rather diffuse images, ideas or words competing for full attention against each other for a while. In the case of the shopping tour these may be, for example: a vage image of the contents of the refrigerator to suggest what is needed, elusive connotations of various supermarkets or small shops, snaphshot views of congested streets and some fleeting sensory reminiscenses of dishes that are on the cooking plan for the coming days. | ||||||
| Sooner or later, one of the images will dominate over the others. As it gains in clarity, new images come within the ken of your attention. The image of a certain supermarket may suggest the image of a friend of yours you met there last week and who suggested a barbecue evening. From here, your thoughts may wander off to still other images and the chances are high, that you may lose your initial question of of sight. | ||||||
| Also bear in mind,that as each image brings with it a number of further associations, the direction of your thinking and the quality of its result heavily depend on the strength of those associations. | ||||||
| This mode of thinking corresponds in some striking ways to a typical internet session. Suppose you were consulting the internet to make a list of possible holiday locations for a local youth group. You`d probably start by entering some search words like „holiday, children, youth“. As a result you are presented with a number of hits. You will open on of them which brings a new load of facts and further links to your attention. The quality of your session will heavily depend on how well links correspond to the content of the information sources thus addressed. And a good internet surfer will soon develop some sort of instinct that gives him some clue as to the content of internet sites. However, as in thinking, there is always a danger of getting lost by an uncontrolled following of links and associations. | ||||||
| We do not wish to overstrain the likeness between human thinking and knowledge work at a PC yet. We must, however, lay considerable stress on the similarities between the flow of ideas, images, words i. e. notions as existing in human brains on the one hand and information ressources in information networks such as the internet or companies and information working in both cases seems to involve hopping from one image to the next. We can, therefore, expect the nature of these notions to be of high importance. | ||||||
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