Intertextuality (2)

Charles Sanders Peirce classified our way of interpreting stuff in the following ascending order of reference categories:
- similarity
- correlation
- convention

The latter method is the basis of symbolic interpretation. Most of this goes on at the higher-order yet sub-conscious level of our thinking, and usually doesn't involve any jumps in the conscious flow.

Hyperlinking gives us a sense of the recursive nature of symbolic reference, but as Terence Deacon put it in a slightly different context, "Focusing on correspondence alone collapses a multilevel relationship into a simple mapping relationship".

I can only recommend Deacon's book The Symbolic Species in which he outlined why symbols are classic case of a reference system that is hard to get started from the bottom up. He reckons that humans learn symbols at a critical stage in the development of the young mind where indexical relationships can be suppressed or subordinated to inter-symbol relationships, thereby prioritising higher-order regularity.

This is achieved by what he describes as "a shift in mnemonic strategy". Our nearest relatives, the chimps tend to struggle with symbols. But tellingly, young chimps and bonobos can make significant progress.

Anyway, these posts have not been an argument against technologies which augment our conscious intentions and actions, but a plea for consideration of the ways that browser software could also benefit from a shift of mnemonic strategy - tools that augment the way we process connections sub-consciously as opposed to dragging submerged references into and out of working memory. I suspect that this objective is anyway in line with Ted's vision of a transcended text that can render our internal reflections and imagination.

The first thing that has to go is the hierarchical folder system called Favourites (Bookmarks). Instead there should be a tool that recognises the difference between sites we habitually visit and pages whose content we wish to assimilate. This could be done with a tagging system. Frode's keyboard shortcuts could also be deployed here.

How about a version of a desktop search applet (like Google's) that is integrated with the browser and only indexed and searched the sites we had tagged? This could be coupled with an Autonomy-style engine that maps out higher level associations between 'stored' passages of text. (Local storage would be the exception not the rule.)