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Collective Thinking

2008-10-16 06:40:49

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Krist f Ny ri

Collective Thinking

With the rise of ubiquitous networked communication due to the internet and its

enhancement by mobile access anytime, anywhere, our capacities for effective problem-

solving both on the practical and the more abstract levels have vastly increased. Two

domains where one would expect such increases to be particularly noticeable are dem-

ocratic politics on the one hand, and scientific and technological creativity on the other.

The advancement of e-democracy and m-democracy was amply demonstrated by a

number of talks given at the Budapest mobile communications conferences of May

2002, April 2003, and June 2004 just think of the papers by D nyi

, Paragas

, Kim

and Lai

and the momentous changes occurring in research and development with the

rise of the new communication patterns have been lucidly analyzed by Laki and Pall at

the 2002 conference. Recall, also, the scientific feat the world witnessed in 2003: the

identification of, and the production of a test for, the SARS virus within a matter of

weeks, an achievement unimaginable without ubiquitous networked communication.

It appears that a new kind of collective thinking has emerged, robust and tangi-

ble. The gains we are enjoying are obvious; but might we not suffer losses as well? Ac-

cording to an influential line of argument that also surfaced at the 2004 Budapest mobile

communications conference, continuous connectedness, and thereby the lack of extend-

ed periods of mental solitude, inevitably leads to superficiality in thinking. James Katz

alluded to the concern that due to "mobile-communication activities in classrooms"

problems may be emerging such as "damage to attention spans" and to "critical-thinking

skills", as well as the loss of "ability to concentrate, to plan, and to work with complex

ideas"

. Raimondo Strassoldo employed less uncertain terms. As he put it: "There is a

time for speaking and communicating; but there should also be a time for thinking, for

meditation, for contemplation, for concentration, for reflection, for introspection, for in-

ternal talk within oneself and, perhaps, with the inhabitants of the self." Strassoldo ob-

serves that with the spread of the mobile phone people "only seem to be able to exist as

Endre D nyi Mikl s S k sd, "M-Politics in the Making: SMS and E-mail in the 2002 Hungarian Elec-

tion Campaign", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), Mobile Communication: Essays on Cognition and Community, Vi-

enna: Passagen Verlag, 2003, pp. 211 232; Endre D nyi, "WLC 2 UROP / Interconnected Public Spheres

in the Age of Mobile Communication" in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local

in Mobile Communication, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2005, pp. 129 137.

Fernando Paragas, "Dramatextism: Mobile Telephony and People Power in the Philippines", in Krist f

Ny ri (ed.), Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003, pp.

259 283.

Shin Dong Kim, "The Shaping of New Politics in the Era of Mobile and Cyber Communication: The

Internet, Mobile Phone and Political Participation in Korea", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), Mobile Democracy,

pp. 317 325.

On-Kwok Lai, "Mobile Communicating for (E-)Democracy beyond Sovereign Territorial Boundaries:

Transnational Advocacies versus E-Government Initiatives in Comparative Perspectives", in Krist f Ny ri

(ed.), Mobile Democracy, pp. 327 337; Shizuka Abe On-Kwok Lai, "Mobile Communicative Actions

in (Anti-)Globalization Processes: Social Agencies and the State in an Information Society", in Krist f

Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of Place, pp. 93 103.

James E. Katz, "Mobile Phones in Educational Settings", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of Place, p. 316.

Here Katz is referring to Marilyn Gilroy's paper Invasion of the Classroom Cell Phones , Education Di-

gest, vol. 69, no. 6 (2004), pp. 56 61.

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nodes and terminals of communication networks". As he sees it, the young are ever less

capable of becoming "autonomous, self-directed individuals", and he recalls David

Riesman "denounc[ing] more than half a century ago the trend toward other-directed-

ness".

Strassoldo's reference to Riesman is not entirely apt. The latter did in fact make

the connection, in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, between the printed book and

inner-directedness;

however, Riesman's notion of other-directedness is thoroughly

bound up with the experience of centralized mass media. Networked communication of

course provides one with very different experiences. Do we have reason to believe that

the network individual's cognitive achievements

are in any way inferior to that of the

inner-directed one? It was in the wake of Strassoldo's talk

that I decided, during the

planning stages of the present conference, to dedicate my paper to the topic of collective

thinking.

Solitude

Will the incessantly communicating individual, then, produce but superficial

thoughts; is solitude a necessary precondition of depth? Note that the term "solitude" has

no meaning unless set against the background of a given communicational technology.

The solitude of one bewitched by a book is different from the solitude of sulking Achil-

les and the solitude of the lonely texter. For members of nonliterate cultures solitude is

an enforced condition, bound up with exceptional events such as rites of passage, or oc-

curring as a result of unusual, indeed catastrophic, events. Similarly with silence. Refer-

ring to a nonliterate Eskimo tribe in the 1950s, psychiatrist J. C. Carothers found it sig-

nificant that people there "talked a great deal", obeying the "rule of Eskimo life ... that a

Raimondo Strassoldo, "The Meaning of Localism in a Global World", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of

Place, p. 56.

The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, by David Riesman in collaboration

with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, see esp. pp. 89 97. A

singularly perceptive analysis of this book as seen from the perspective of the orality/literacy contrast is

provided by J. C. Carothers in his paper "Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word", Psychiatry: Journal

for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 22 (1959), 307 320.

I have begun using the term "network individual", for designating what I think is a new type of personal-

ity, in the early stages of the project COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY (cf. http://21st.

century.phil-inst.hu/2Summ.htm, see also my preface to the volume Krist f Ny ri (ed.), Mobile Democra-

cy, p. 16).

And as a consequence of the recognition that the phenomenon Strassoldo refers to the tendency for

young people to be in continuous mobile contact has clearly become a very real one. A dramatic narra-

tive is Lin Prřitz's paper "Intimacy Fiction: Intimate Discourses in Mobile Telephone Communication

amongst Norwegian Youth", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of Place, pp. 191 200. My favourite sentence

in Prřitz's paper is the one where she says of the teenage couple she deals with: "they send persistent text

messages to each other from the very moment they wake up until they go to sleep interrupted only, so to

speak, by the text message break that occurs when they are physically together" (ibid., p. 198).

I became further motivated by an article in the December 13, 2004, issue of The Christian Science

Monitor, quoting Naomi Baron, Professor of Linguistics at American University, author of Alphabet to

Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It s Heading, London: Routledge, 2000. "If you talk to

students you often find they have trouble being alone", Baron said. "Some argue that cellphones make it

possible to have larger social safety net and that contact is good. I argue that part of what makes a human

being is the ability to be alone with no one to help [think] through a number of difficult circumstances ...

to figure out who [we] are, where [we] want to go, who [we] want to be." I side with those who believe

that what constitutes a human being is the ability to communicate with other human beings.

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man must not keep any thought to himself for if he does so he will go mad".

Prelit-

erate, Homeric Greek had no words to represent solitary, inner, mental events; thinking

was a dialogue, thinking to oneself a dialogue between parts of one's body. There was

no vocabulary to express abstract cognitive states or processes.

That vocabulary was

gradually built up by Western philosophy, beginning with Plato, and reaching a point of

culmination and a new beginning with Descartes. Ernest Gellner's book Language and

Solitude

sketches a variety of perspectives from which to understand Cartesian-type

loneliness; in the present talk, I will concentrate on one such perspective, namely that of

silent reading.

Deep Thoughts

The term "superficiality" is merely a metaphor, complementing the already du-

bious metaphor of "depth", the latter suggested by the metaphor of "immersion" engen-

dered by the experience of silent reading. As demonstrated in the 1920s in the pioneer-

ing work of the Hungarian scholar J zsef Balogh, silent reading was almost unknown in

ancient Greece and Rome, and all through the Middle Ages;

the written text, devoid of

intervals and punctuation, had to be read out loud in order to be understood. Under such

conditions, written-down thoughts, as contrasted with spoken-out-loud ones, do not ex-

ude the suggestion of depth. Neither in Plato's Academy, nor in Aristotle's school would

"depth" have been a word of praise. Plato extolled "clearness and perfection and serious-

ness", "communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is

the true way of writing"

even if, of course, he himself committed his philosophy to

writing, while mimicking, in his dialogues, the style of spoken exchange. As to Aristot-

le, it is here essential to register the simple truth which centuries of specialist scholar-

ship, for obvious psychological and sociological reasons, have refused to accept, namely

that the Corpus Aristotelicum was not the work of a single individual, but of generations

of teachers and students of the Peripatetic School. The Corpus is the written documenta-

tion of oral discussions stretching over many decades. As Grayeff puts it in his work Ar-

istotle and His School: "as regards both their meaning and their structure, [these writ-

ings] become intelligible only when it is realized that they are part of a[n imaginary] di-

alogue carried on between the lecturer and rival philosophers".

What the Aristotelian

school valued was not depth, but articulateness, and dexterity in open argumentation.

The printed page is easily scanned; with the spread of Gutenberg's invention, in

the course of two or three centuries, silent reading becomes the rule. Words on the print-

ed page appear clearly and distinctly, creating an illusion of autonomous ideas clear and

distinct in the reader/thinker's mind. The prophet of this illusion was Descartes. The sto-

Carothers, op. cit., p. 314. The reference is actually a quote from Katharine Scherman's Spring on an

Arctic Island, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1956.

For references, see my paper "Thinking with a Word Processor", in R. Casati (ed.), Philosophy and the

Cognitive Sciences, Vienna: H lder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1994, pp. 63 74. A digital version of the paper is

available at http://www.phil-inst.hu/nyiri/KRB93_TLK.htm.

Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Cf. Josef Balogh, "'Voces Paginarum': Beitr ge zur Geschichte des lauten Lesens und Schreibens", Phi-

lologus 82 (1926), pp. 84 109, 202 40. See also Paul Saenger, "Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medi-

eval Script and Society", Viator 13 (1982), pp. 367 414.

Phaedrus 278a, Jowett transl.

See esp. Felix Grayeff, Aristotle and His School, London: Duckworth, 1974

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ry of his withdrawal into seclusion during the winter of 1619 1620 is well-known, and

the philosophical results of his solitary meditations were of course pathetic. The formula

"Cogito, ergo sum" might have convinced some generations of thinkers labouring under

unnatural conditions of communication similar to those affecting Descartes; but it would

definitely meet with incomprehension on the part of today's texters, becoming unsure of

themselves the moment the stream of incoming messages is at a low ebb. Similarly in-

comprehensible to habitual senders and receivers of e-mails, to regular mobile phone

users, or indeed to ardent employers of texting/chatting abbreviations, would be John

Locke's thesis that the words of language are actually "marks for the ideas within [one's]

own mind"

a thesis directly leading to the position according to which, as Wittgen-

stein put it, "[t]he individual words of language refer to what can only be known

to the person speaking", namely to "immediate private" mental contents, with the im-

plication that "another person cannot understand the language".

Wittgenstein believed

himself to have shown that a private language is impossible; but what he actually did

show, I think, is that such a language is impossible under the conditions of an oral cul-

ture.

In the culture of the printed book one can indeed become enmeshed in one's ver-

bal abstractions, ending up with unfathomable ideas: deep thoughts, if you like. By the

late 18th century there arose a feeling that depth is ineffable. As the Romantic poet

Friedrich Schiller wrote: "Spricht die Seele so spricht ach! schon die Seele nicht mehr."

Visible Thoughts

Now it is essential to note that while writing in its fully developed form, i.e. the

printed text, fosters a seeming clarity, and actual obscurity, of thinking turned inward,

from the very beginning it also gives rise to an enhanced coherence of thinking conduct-

ed externally, publicly. As the Hungarian historian Istv n Hajnal wrote in the early

1930s, referring to the beginnings of alphabetic literacy in Greece: "Writing vividly ac-

companies the human being's outer and inner life, objectifying it and thus rendering it

capable of being observed. It links together the past and the present in the life of both

the individual and the community, it encourages rational thinking, and enables the build-

ing of complicated mental edifices."

As, not independently of Hajnal's work, Walter J.

Ong underlines in his Orality and Literacy, writing of course is, in a sense, alienating.

However, as he puts it: "Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and is in

many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not

only proximity but also distance."

Seen from the perspective opened up by Hajnal it is

not difficult to understand why people often prefer to write SMS messages instead of

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 3, chapter 1, sect. 2.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953, Part I, 243.

See my paper "Writing and the Private Language Argument", in J. C. Ny ri, Tradition and Individual-

ity: Essays, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992. My point of departure in that paper is Bronislaw Malinowski's es-

say in the Ogden and Richards volume The Meaning of Meaning (1923). Language in a preliterate culture,

Malinowski emphasized, is never "a mere mirror of reflected thought"; in writing however "language be-

comes a condensed piece of reflection", the reader "reasons, reflects, remembers, imagines". Such reflec-

tion is, as Malinowski sees the matter, a philosophically dangerous enterprise, leading to a "misuse of

words", and thereby to a misleading picture of human communication and cognition.

Istv n Hajnal, " r sbelis g, intellektu lis r teg s eur pai fejlőd s" ["Literacy, Intellectual Stratum, and

European Development"], 1933, repr. in Hajnal Istv n, Technika, művelőd s: Tanulm nyok ["Technolo-

gy, Education: Essays], Budapest: Hist ria, 1993, p. 43.

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982, p. 82.

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calling; or why, as for instance Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper have discovered,

surrounding the computer display with an array of printouts is indispensable if office

workers want to understand longer texts and compose decent documents. On a less pe-

destrian level, Hajnal is a precursor of Merlin Donald's external memory theory, accord-

ing to which the "three broadly different modes of visual symbolic invention" making

up the last evolutionary transition in the development of humankind, namely the "picto-

rial, ideographic, and phonological", signalled the beginnings of "a new cognitive struc-

ture", leading, also, towards forms of "analytic thought", i.e. "formal arguments, system-

atic taxonomies, induction, deduction".

And Donald's external memory theory is then

taken over by Andy Clark, a fact perhaps less than sufficiently acknowledged by the lat-

ter, in the form of the "extended mind" theory, a theory that plays a major role at the

present conference: Andrew Brook, John Preston, and Zsuzsanna Kondor all deal with

it.

In the first chapter of McLuhan's Understanding Media there is a passage that

ends with an intriguing, seldom-quoted sentence. "The content of writing", the passage

runs, "is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content

of the telegraph. If it is asked, 'What is the content of speech?', it is necessary to say, "It

is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.' "

Donald's external mem-

ory theory does allow for thought to be nonverbal, in that it underlines the primary role

of the pictorial in the sequence of visual symbolic inventions. Thoughts are made visible

not just by writing, but also by images. However, as alphabetical literacy became in-

creasingly dominant, with written texts widely copied while the technology of duplicat-

ing pictures was severely lagging behind, visible thinking became, for many centuries,

merely thinking in words.

This situation has changed, at first gradually, with the in-

vention of the printed image and later with the rise of photography, and then dramatical-

ly with the emergence of computer graphics. Computer graphics are at their best when

turned into animations. Animations, however, cannot be conveyed via hardcopy; you

need to watch a screen, and, ultimately, you also need to be online. We are back at the

recognition that serious thinking, today, is inevitably thinking in the medium of ubiq-

uitous networked communication.

The Collective Mind

In my paper "Thinking with a Word Processor", given at the 1993 Wittgenstein

Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, I concluded by saying: "When we think with a

word processor it is a synchronous intellectual exchange with fellow thinkers all over

Abigail J. Sellen Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, Cambridge, MA: The MIT

Press, 2002.

Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 278, 284, 273.

Clark's new study, with direct bearing on the issue of mobile phones, the book Natural-Born Cyborgs:

Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, con-

tains two references to Donald the index lists him as Merlin, D. neither of which does any justice to

the very close parallels between the external memory / extended mind theories.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964,

p. 8.

I have dwelled at some length on this theme in my papers "The Picture Theory of Reason", in Berit

Brogaard and Barry Smith (eds.), Rationality and Irrationality, Wien: bv-hpt, 2001, pp. 242 266, and

"Pictorial Meaning and Mobile Communication", in Krist f Ny ri (ed)., Mobile Communication, pp. 157

184; see also my essay "Images of Home", in Krist f Ny ri (ed.), A Sense of Place, pp. 375 381.

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the world we are, ultimately, engaged in. So what are we thinking with when we think

with a word processor? The word 'with' here does in the last analysis point not to in-

strumental application but to human companionship."

This paper was basically a

continuation of what one could call Wittgenstein's theory of the extended mind, put for-

ward, for example, in one of the opening remarks of the Blue Book: "We may say that

thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by

the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and the larynx, when we think by

speaking If we talk about the locality where thinking takes place we have a right to

say that this locality is the paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks."

Wittgenstein's theory of the extended mind essentially involves the position that

the agent of thinking encompasses not just devices external to the individual brain, but

also the community of thinkers playing the same language-game. As he puts it in a well-

known passage of the Philosophical Investigations: "If language is to be a means of

communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this

may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so. human be-

ings agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of

life."

It is interesting to note that Heidegger, along with Wittgenstein the other great

twentieth-century philosopher of post-literacy, had quite similar views, even if express-

ed in a rather different terminology. "We do not merely speak the language", he wrote,

"we speak by way of it. ... We hear language speaking. ... language speaks."

("Wir

sprechen nicht nur die Sprache, wir sprechen aus ihr. ... Wir h ren das Sprechen der

Sprache. ... die Sprache spricht.") Both for Wittgenstein and Heidegger, speaking, and

thus thinking, is first, foremost, and to the end, a collective achievement. The primary

agent of thinking is the community of speakers; the rules of traditional logic are a

makeshift substitute in the mind of the solitary thinker for the absent voices of inter-

locutors. In the age of post-literacy linear logic is, once more, supplanted by the logic of

conversation. As McLuhan's theory of the extended mind foresaw: "In the electric age

our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of

mankind the creative process of knowing will be collectively extended to the

whole of human society".

But let me note, in closing, that the working of the collective mind does not al-

ways rely on networking. It was a fundamental insight of the economist and philosopher

Friedrich August von Hayek that not only is social knowledge, under modern condi-

tions, fragmented in the sense that "each member of society can have only a small frac-

tion of the knowledge possessed by all, and ... each is therefore ignorant of most of the

facts on which the working of society rests", but also that this knowledge must remain

"widely dispersed among individuals", since it is tacit, practical, local, not of the kind

that can be transferred, ordered, united. How can we benefit, Hayek asks, from "knowl-

edge ... we do not possess"?

Hayek's question is echoed by James Surowiecki in his

J. C. Ny ri, "Thinking with a Word Processor", cf. note 12 above.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. pp. 6 f.

Philosophical Investigations, 241 f.

Martin Heidegger, "The Way to Language" (1959), in Heidegger, On the Way to Language, New York:

Harper & Row, 1971, p. 124.

Understanding Media, pp. 3 f.

F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order, London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1973, pp. 13 15.

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recent The Wisdom of Crowds,

a stimulating albeit inconclusive book; but then Hayek

himself, at the end of the day, was unable to outline a conclusive answer. Hayek empha-

sized the role the market plays in co-ordinating local segments of knowledge; he did

not, however, build upon the fact that the marketed goods themselves bring together,

embody, and carry such knowledge. Our tools and devices are materialized results and

vehicles of, as well as ever new inputs to, collective thinking. And here, finally, the mo-

bile phone re-enters not as a means of communication, but as the supreme instance of

an instrument incorporating the expertise of a vast number of specialists, enabling the

individual to enjoy the fruits of that enhanced scientific and technological creativity to

which I was referring when I embarked on this talk.

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Col-

lective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, New York: Random House, 2004.