Back in the 1960s Douglas Engelbart challenged the way people thought
about things. In a 1962 report titled “Augmenting Human Intellect,” he
proposed a switch from linear thinking –i.e., “a sequence of steps of
reason, beginning with known facts, assumptions, etc., and progressing
towards a conclusion”– to a system based on the rearrangement of
concept-statements. He used punched index cards and thread. It sounds
very rustic, I know, but he basically was talking about creating a
database of knowledge that we could search thanks to algorithms, and
then re-organize –sew the cards back in different groupings; networks of
interrelated concepts. He tried to convince his audience that reasoning
–the way we think– could change, but first, he (although Douglas was a
bit strange –and maybe a tad sexist– and when writing these reports didn’t use
the “I” form, but invented a weird alter-ego called Joe, who did most
of the cool talking) says: “I want you to notice how hard it is for a
person to realize how really unquestioning he is about the way he does
things.” In other words, what our friend Joe is suggesting is this: once
you reveal the invisible –automatic– linear structures that have been
forcing your mind to think linearly, you are free to challenge them, and
move on.
We like Joe. Joe is cool.
Today we have the Web –full of gigantic “searchable” databases. We
also have computers where pretty much everything is also stored in a
similar fashion. I can search my Mac’s “finder” and get any documents I
need. I type in a word I know is tied to a concept I am interested and
voila, I get tons of related information. I get good results because
when I type down stuff –any information about a book or an article or
any random idea–, I give it a tag. I give my own genius ideas the
same-ish tags I give to any copied quotes or short paragraphs about a
book’s relevant themes. This way, I place my thinking within others’.
When I want to write something new, I rummage through these bits of
information and re-arrange them to create a patchwork document I work
with. A sort of essay cut-up. Each part acts like a node in a network.
Then, however, I cave in to conventionalism and cover the emptiness
between fragments with narrative and, through tyrannic meaningful
grammar that really stresses the inevitable “I” in narrative writing, I
allocate each concept in its place so my readers can access the one
linear path I finally choose for them to access. I write an essay.
I’m not quite as cool as Joe. But I think we could be friends, I like to think we think alike.
A
--from alexsaummedia.wordpress.com
