Information Tunnels

Headlines. I come across them everyday. “MySQL to Adopt Solid Storage Engine”. I read this headline and something happens in my brain. I am either interested and become conscious of the headline, or, hardly noticing, I skip over it.

I decide quickly whether I want to continue reading the whole article. Actually I’m not really aware that I’m deciding. When reading an online headline for instance, I just click. Some process inside my brain must have made made me click, a conglomerate of past memories maybe, a current technological interest, or something.

My brain is deciding for me, it knows why and how. Some of its structures have decided to twitch my finger and also have let me know that they have clicked. This is how Wegner sees it anyway (Wegner, D M 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will MIT Press, Cambridge).

But going back to the click and the headline. I plug into a data stream, virtually, conceptually and physically.

I connect to the machine because of my inner thought pattern - call it interest in the topic - to the communication machine. It could be a printed newspaper as well as a networked computer screen. I read the headline and possibly continue reading the whole article. I could also go to the new web page of course. In both cases I open up something like a conceptual tunnel linking my inner thoughts to the machine's thoughts. Or should I say my thoughts become the machine’s thoughts?

As I read I emulate the headline in my brain. The headline that someone else wrote, or another machine wrote. A machine spitting out headlines.

So the headline I tunnel into does things in my brain. I react emotionally. I like it or I don't. I can get upset, or curious, ecstatic or simply indifferent. We always already have some emotion (Heidegger). Indifference is an emotion too.

But I may not only react emotionally I can also take action. If the headline reads: “WAR BROKEN OUT” I might ring my family, talk to my neighbour in the café next to me. I become engaged in this way or that way. But not only me. I do what probably in this moment thousands of other people do that read that same headline and article.

The headline controls the pattern generator in my brain, memory banks are tapped, new memory loops generated, enforced, depending on the conceptual power of the headline. The phrase “WAR BROKEN OUT” I will not forget for the rest of my life. “MySQL to Adopt storage Engine” will probably only remain in memory if I’m a MySQL developer.

Now imagine your web browser as a container, or better an array of containers, clicking tabs open container after container. Each container is filled with headlines, each headline is pumped into your container as soon as it appears from the source. It can be a news service, a discussion forum, a web log, a weather channel, sports news, science and technology news and more.

Your container's wriggly headlines finger your brain. You scan over them, focus on this one or that one. Most you ignore. Some trigger some response and you click. You feel like clicking on the Peanuts cartoons, the weather channel, or the world's news wires. Fingers pulling and pushing, waving and luring. In minutes you have scanned the entire page, you go to the next tab, and the next.

In a couple of minutes you can scan a few hundred headlines. It may take some practice but once you start realizing how effortless it is to scan hundreds of information chunks for their usefulness this thing becomes incredibly valuable. A true thinking machine. You find stuff you normally would never come across.

These new web tools are literary machines Ted Nelson might have never dreamed of, consisting of modules that you can assemble according to your own taste, desire, belief, interest or need. Check out Netvibes, a Web 2.0 application. I wouldn't want to live without it anymore.