If electric flying monkeys could dream:

In 50 years, I think that people will think in much the same way that they think today—and thought 50 years before today. I suspect this may be a naughty thing to say in this class, but I’m not sure that new media changes the way we think so much as it becomes a closer reflection of how we already think. New mediaists (new mediaites?), post humanists, and cyborg theorists hypothesize that technology advances and we, taking the next step in evolution, attempt to mimic (even deify) the machines that are capable of executing such complex algorithms with inhuman speed. When Al Gore invented the internet, it infested our minds to the point that people shortened their attention spans and came to rely on hypertext-based thinking to reflect (.com-envy) one of the seven wonders of the modern world. I realize that I’m arguing over the chicken or egg coming first, but I think that people have always had nearly incoherent ideas that jump instantly from subject to subject. Refer to an old class favorite, Plato’s Phaedrus, for an excellent example of hypertext thought. Socrates and Phaedrus begin by discussing love, then move to rhetoric, the soul, divine inspiration, and even art. The dialogue, and Socrates’ thought processes, hardly plays out in a simple linear fashion as the “new” media of the day would suggest. Hypertext today certainly does seem to mimic our thought processes better than a standard written book might, but that hardly means that is changing the way we think. In fifty years there will be computers with hypertext links like today, but they will jump from link to link without the prompting of the reader/viewer. Instead, these AIs will “think” for itself by determining for itself what utterly useless google fact it wants to jump to next. It will move from link to link in an insolvable labyrinth with seemingly endless futures to choose from. Will this really be a completely new way of thinking, or will computer scientists merely have managed to mimic the average high school student’s daily internet surfing habits? I’d love to continue but I’ve run out of blogging space. See you all in class…