`Future minds' will prefer images to words

Wan A. Hulaimi
New Straits Times
07-17-2011
`Future minds' will prefer images to words
Byline: Wan A. Hulaimi
Edition: New Sunday Times
Section: Main Section
Column: Elsewhere

HOW we think, store and manage information will occupy us for the next decade as computers become even smaller and more powerful. Our brains adapt to the tools we use and grow or diminish accordingly.

We are even now becoming less reliant on memory and more concerned with where items are. We don't even memorise telephone numbers any more, knowing that all can be stored digitally in our mobiles and the Internet becomes our collective memory.
At Columbia University, where research has been done on the effects of search engines on our brain, researcher Betsy Sparrow says that we are reorganising the way we remember.

"Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found," she says in the journal Science.

It reminds us of what Einstein once said about not memorising things if you can look them up in books. This was the thought of a genius capable of original thinking in his grey matter, but what of people like us who rely on the interaction of ours and other people's thoughts to make sense of this world? If knowledge is understood to be something that you can look up whenever you want, then there's the tacit acceptance that the mulling and understanding of knowledge becomes secondary. Our mind become merely an index of possibilities.

Richard Watson, an expert on trends and strategy, recognises that these "future minds" will be non-linear and will have a preference for images to words.

There will be a greater focus on the self, he says in his book, Future Minds. People who are screeangers now will prefer digital devices at the expense of personal interaction. Our children are already doing it now, interacting and befriending people they know only by their avatars, and being friendly to many and diverse types without the inconvenience of having to be glad handing with people.

"The screenager brain is agile," Watson says. "But [he] is often ignorant of wider context and culture."

Familiarity with high speed access to information will also translate to their everyday practical world. They will be speed- obsessed, impatient with the queueing up and waiting up for their turn in the real world; they will probably have little patience with the business of interacting physically with someone they don't know.

We already see this in our everyday display of things, how advertising boards are now moving so rapidly for us to have the merest glimpse of the embedded message, and in the boardroom and classrooms, the PowerPoint display is becoming the message much as the media analyst Marshall McLuhan foresaw it all those years ago, though McLuhan used "massage" in a sense that was both prescient and playful.

The PowerPoint is changing discourse in many ways. Sound and colour become as important as content, and interaction with the audience - body, eyes, voice - become less important than the bullet points on the wall. Even the presenter himself is coloured by the projection onto his body, standing in the way of his message as it were, and inviting everyone to behold the truth on the wall, coming through me.

This is the end of oratory, to say the least, but as someone said it (I can't remember who now, or where, perhaps I'll Google him later), the PowerPoint is the directive in the boardroom, taking a superior position to mere assumptions of the speaker.

In a world where books and reading material are secondary, there is this delicious irony where, in a situation where speech ought to prevail, it has to be reinforced by words on the wall.

There is a big task for policy makers in a world where not just our material world but we ourselves are changing daily. We view things by the tools that we have made for ourselves, and by our inventions we sometimes see the world. Whether this is good or bad again depends on how we define quality. We may have children deprived of nursery rhymes or the delightful, rhythmic terror of Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee. Life will go on as it always will, but it is for us to decide what will make us better as a person or as a community.

"At every step we have to ask, as educators and citizens, whether current technology is leading us in directions that serve our human purposes," says Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, in her essay on how computers change the way we think.

"Such questions are not technical; they are social, moral, and political," she says.

We are living in a time when the cellphone reshapes time and space, observes Richard Watson. "They allow people not to commit, or to save commitment to the very last second."

Even relationships are fluid thereby. I have stories of people who, by their mobile phones, send the following diktat: "I divorce thee."

* Wan A Hulaimi's latest book, A Map of Trengganu (written under his pen-name Awang Goneng), is now available in bookshops. He may be contacted at elsewhere@columnist.com

(Copyright 2011)