During the last week of my 8th grade year my best friend got arrested for buying LSD at school. She was grounded for the entire summer and I was the only friend she was allowed to see. We spent the entire summer in her room with nothing to do, so we were forced to get creative with the resources we had around us – four walls. Every night we would play this game that really just consisted of thinking. We would initiate with “go” and then we would sit there quietly for a few minutes until one of us would say “stop”. Then we would describe to each other our different thoughts and how one lead to the other, “I looked at the fish tank and that reminded me of how my mother used to give me fish sticks all the time and how I would watch The Gong Show while I ate and then The Gong Show reminded me of how I always wanted to play the drums….” And so on and so forth. Essentially we were mapping our thoughts and the strange ways in which our brains function. Our thoughts travel through a random maze of tunnels, just like hypertext. Candace’s poem last week described the bizarre path the internet lead her down when she started with one central idea. Isn’t that path a reflection of the way we think though? Don’t our minds naturally travel from one idea to the next based on small notions, ideas or pictures that spark some other direction of thought? David Kolb’s website “Twin Media: Hypertext Structure Under Pressure” exemplifies the avenues that hypertext travels and at the same time shows us how we think; how our thoughts conjoin to one another and take us down a path that we can’t always necessarily find our way back through. The game that my friend and I used to play had to only go for a few minutes at a time otherwise we would lose ourselves in our thoughts. We essentially would lose the trail of breadcrumbs we were attempting to leave in order to trace our thought patterns back to their origins.
Diana George and Diane Shoos in “Dropping Breadcrumbs in the Intertextual Forest” state “Although the links we find in web pages are intriguing to follow, but they are often arbitrary links.” Our minds surf from thought to thought naturally, but in order to come to a conclusion about something we use some tool to ground our thoughts. We form a question and think of all of the possible answers. We think of a situation, and scan our memories for similar things. In conversations we attempt to relate to whomever we are speaking with through an interweaving of commonalities. Technology is a representation of our train of thoughts that we need to anchor with the same tools we use in thinking. It is a brain, just like ours, able to search and find information for whatever purpose we decide on–it is just connected to a much larger bank of information that needs to be waded through and analyzed for credibility and hidden agendas.
Learning to travel the internet, to be the captain of the ship sailing on the ocean of information is difficult as a child of television. Ideas and images have been fed to me through a tube for as long as I can remember. The bottom line is this: the internet has given us the freedom to think again. Instead of being forced to sit between four walls and watch how our minds think or drink from the entertainment tube we are able to sit back in a chair and traverse the collective mind. Our brains have always acted hypertextually, the evolution from thinking on the page and thinking in the collective space of the internet can actually be seen as the natural progression of human thought.