The development of clip thinking - the brain virus of the Internet age

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The increasing pace and volume of information flow in modern culture require new approaches to the extraction and processing of information, which cannot but affect the change in both classical ideas about thought processes and the thinking process itself.

In Russian humanities, a new type of thinking was called "clip" [Girenok 2016] by analogy with a music video representing

“… A weakly interconnected set of images” [Pudalov 2011, 36].

Depending on the goals of the research and the subject area, clip thinking is defined as “fragmentary”, “discrete”, “mosaic” [Gritsenko 2012, 71], “button”, “pixel” (the term was invented by the writer A. Ivanov [Zhuravlev 2014, 29]), “Hasty”, extremely simplified [Koshel, Segal 2015, 17], opposing it to the conceptual, logical, “bookish”. The semantic ambiguity (and therefore blurring) of the concept of "clip thinking", burdened with negative connotations, prompts researchers to look for a more accurate equivalent. So, according to K. G. Frumkin, it would be more correct to speak not about “clip”, but “alternative thinking” (from “alternation” - alternation) [Frumkin 2010, 33].

However, in this case, we are only dealing with renaming, since the characteristics of the latter - fragmentation, disorder, the skill of quickly switching between pieces of information - simply coincide with the characteristics of “clip thinking”. Thus, we are still not getting close to clarifying the essence of the phenomenon under consideration.

Since the new type of thinking comes into conflict with the textual culture, which forms the basis of the traditional education process, the majority of domestic ones [Frumkin 2010; Koshel, Segal 2015; Venediktov 2014] and foreign scientists [Galyona, Gumbrecht 2016; Moretti 2014] consider "clip thinking" in the context of research into the crisis of education, in particular the crisis of reading culture, and ways to resolve it.

In the era of the diversity of mass media, a person (and, first of all, representatives of the younger generation) inevitably develops new abilities: the ability to perceive pictures that quickly replace each other and operate with meanings of a fixed length.

At the same time, the ability to understand long-term linear sequences, to establish cause-and-effect relationships and to intelligent reflection are gradually fading away, fading into the background. According to the apt observation of H. W. Gumbrecht, his own and the younger generation

"… reading skills differed not in shade or degree, but in almost ontological radicalism"

Researchers traditionally identify the pros and cons of a new type of thinking, but few people set themselves the task of correlating "clip thinking" (which some scientists tend to call thinking only with a big reservation [Gorobets, Kovalev 2015, 94]) with other, close to it types thinking. It is required not only to systematize existing scientific ideas about the phenomenon of clip thinking, but to find an answer to the question: how clip thinking is connected with other, often “bipolar” types of intellectual activity, and what opportunities for studying this phenomenon open up for humanitarian knowledge.

Stereotypical thinking and clip thinking

Clip thinking, understood as thinking with images, pictures, emotions, rejecting causal relationships and relationships, is often identified with stereotypical thinking. There are a number of reasons for this identification.

Firstly, one of the sources of the emergence of clip thinking can be considered mass culture and the stereotypes imposed by it. It is known that, describing the model of the “mass man”, J. Ortega y Gasset (“Rise of the masses” [Ortega y Gasset 2003]), J. Baudrillard (“In the shadow of the silent majority, or the End of the social” [Baudrillard 2000]) deduced such characteristics of a "person of the masses" as self-satisfaction, the ability to "be neither oneself nor another", the inability to dialogue, "the inability to listen and reckon with authority." The masses are given meaning, and they are hungry for the spectacle.

Messages are handed to the masses, and they are only interested in signs. The main force of the mass is silence. The masses "think" in stereotypes. A stereotype is a copy, a public representation, a message delivered to the masses.

In other words, stereotypes act as manipulative formulas that remove the need for independent intellectual activity and facilitate communication. From the point of view of sociology, a stereotype is a template, a stable evaluative education that does not require thinking, but allows one to navigate at the level of social instincts.

Obviously, thinking in stereotypes is thinking limited by the cramped space of someone else's thought, in which connections are lost and an integral interpretation of the world is destroyed.

By definition, a stereotype is alien to doubt, which, in turn, presupposes a person's will (“Doubt is finding the place of my will in the world, on the assumption that there is no world without this will” [Mamardashvili]).

Stereotyping as a tacit acceptance of other people's messages consecrated by tradition, as an empty sign preceded clip thinking. The loss of meaning at the level of thinking by stereotypes makes it untenable to talk about the possibility of an individual, independent vision that requires intellectual effort. The stereotypical thinking of our time is thinking with slogans, in which the place of the semantic word is taken by the magic word: “They don’t argue about tastes!”, “Pushkin is our everything!”, “Good day!” - the list is endless. And even the contact-establishing phrase "How are you?" is just a stereotypical label that does not require semantic content.

Secondly, such characteristics as irrationality and spontaneity contribute to the identification of stereotypical and clip thinking. Thinking with clips and thinking with stereotypes is an obvious adaptation to the growing pace of information exchange, a kind of defensive reaction of a person trying to navigate in a powerful stream of images and thoughts (we must not forget about the mosaic nature of urban space as a human environment).

True, the nature of the irrationality of stereotypical and clip thinking is different. The irrationality of stereotypical thinking is mainly associated with the inability or unwillingness to comprehend, arising from the habit and tradition of using stereotypes. The irrationality of clip thinking is due to the need to operate with meanings of a fixed length, enclosed in a picture, due to the fact that there is no time for comprehension. Saving time in this case is a fundamental factor: to have time for everything and not get lost in the flow of information, to keep up with time.

Thirdly, the habit of communication at the level of exchange of empty signs - stereotypes and clip-pictures - in the last third of the 20th century. was actively supported by technology, thanks to which a new type of person was formed - "homo zapping" [Pelevin]

(zapping is the practice of constantly switching TV channels).

In this type, two characters are represented on equal terms: a person watching TV, and a TV that controls a person. The virtual picture of the world, into which a person is immersed, becomes reality, and TV becomes a remote control for the viewer, an instrument of the influence of the advertising and information field on consciousness. A TV show person is a special phenomenon that is gradually becoming basic in the modern world, and the distinctive features of his consciousness are stereotyped and clip-like character.

So, stereotyped thinking is associated with the emasculation of meaning, the replacement of semantics with the magic of the sounding word. The phenomenon of clip thinking is manifested in the replacement of meaning with a picture, frame, image, a flat image taken out of context. Clip thinking, like stereotypical thinking, is linear, spontaneous, it gives rise to controlled perception, is alien to doubt and does not form free thinking.

Rhizomatic thinking and clip thinking

Clip thinking has common features with rhizomatic thinking. The latter embodies a new type of non-linear, anti-hierarchical ties, and it is the rhizome - the rhizome with its disorder, chaos, associativity, randomness - that J. Deleuze and F. Guattari make a symbol of postmodern aesthetics.

Rhizomatic thinking presupposes deep individual concentration, that very “stay, prolongation in thought and non-folding from it” [Mamardashvili], in the absence of which the processed material falls into clips - fragments, the connection between which is lost.

Describing a new way of thinking, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari rely on the experience of reading and come to the conclusion that only reading allows you to individually build the space of the text and ensures the formation of not a mosaic, but an integral picture of the world [Deleuze, Guattari].

But what kind of reading are we talking about here? If the law of the book is the law of reflection, then sequential and linear reading is a thing of the past along with the causal type of thinking. The right to non-linear reading was defended in the texts of the 90s. XX century:

“At the time when you normally read from left to right and from top to bottom, in hypertext you follow links leading you to different places in the document or even to other related material, even without familiarizing yourself with its whole” [Kuritsyn, Parshchikov 1998].

According to D. Pennack, the reader “has the right to skip,” “the right not to finish reading,” since the reading process cannot be reduced to only one story component [Pennack 2010, 130–132]. When we jump from one link in the plot to another, we, in fact, build our own text, internally mobile and open to interpretive pluralism. This is how rhizomatic thinking is formed - thinking from one point of endless discourse to another, metaphorically represented in the form of a “garden of forking paths” (J. L. Borges) or a “network labyrinth” (U. Eco).

What is the connection between clip and rhizomatic thinking? In both types of mental activity, forms are important. Forms are

“… what is presented at the level of thinking, when we somehow circle, denote what we can fill. On the Internet, forms take on power because they allow all types of applications that go to the Internet (on the line) to reserve and search for their agent. Forms are widely used to pull together information taken from countless contexts on the web”[Kuritsyn, Parshchikov 1998].

In other words, the forms-clips are nothing more than a remote control of the consciousness of a person who builds another, at the same time mosaic and linear, text, while the forms-rhizomes suggest “a plurality that needs to be created” [Deleuze, Guattari], an alternative closed and linear structures with rigid axial orientation.

Examples of rhizomatic forms are Haim Sokol's installation with the self-explanatory title "Flying Grass" and the performances of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei "Fairytale / Fairy Tale" (2007) or "Sunflower Seeds" (2010). These and similar works reveal all the principles of rhizomatic texts that were pointed out by J. Deleuze and F. Guattari: the principle of an insignificant gap, the principle of plurality and the principle of decalcomania.

Decalcomania - the production of printed impressions (decals) for subsequent dry transfer to any surface using high temperature or pressure.

They are also realized by such popular nowadays alternative forms of holding musical concerts as "Enigma", representing a collage of sounds, rhythms, genres. The traditional picture - the orchestra, the solo performer, the declared program - changes radically: the performer is incognito, no program, no video sequence (the concert takes place in the dark). The destruction of the direct connection between the sounding text and knowledge about this text leads to a restructuring of the process of perception itself, to its complication, or, speaking in the language of H. W. Gumbrecht, to the inclusion of perception in the concept of “risky thinking”, when “… a more complex picture of the world is created, preserving the possibilities for an alternative point of view” [Gumbrecht].

Variants of reading one of A. Tarkovsky's films "The Mirror", created in the 70s, give a reason for juxtaposing (and opposing) clip and rhizomatic thinking. XX century and seen through the eyes of generation "P". Young people (17–18 years old), after watching the film material, were asked to draw a “map” of the film, ie. structure what you see. The difficulty lay precisely in the understanding of the violation of the connection between the elements of the text: in the case of a linear text, this leads to its destruction, in nonlinear texts declaring the absence of a semantic center and anti-hierarchy, such a violation is inherent in them; in linear texts, built on the principle of reflection of cause-and-effect relationships, the idea of a “mirror”, tracing paper, is laid, and a rhizomatic text is a text-becoming, it is mobile and susceptible to changes.

The formula for clip thinking is "yes - no", the formula for rhizomatic thinking is "yes and no, and something else."

In carrying out the task, the audience, as a rule, started from the title of the film, in which the “mirror” acted as the semantic center of reading the text, and the chosen form of interpretation - the map - assumed the presence of some axial orientation. As a result, only a few reconstructions offered a stereoscopic reading, thanks to which each of the detected semantic blocks entered into a dialogue relationship with other blocks and with cultural meanings.

In this case, the interpreters spontaneously came to the principle of decalcomania, which dictates the impossibility of filling in a ready-made matrix and specifies the variability of the interpretation vectors. The majority of the participants in the experiment, on the contrary, stated the absence of a semantic center in the proposed literary text and demonstrated an inability to single out semantic points in it. The text thus disintegrated into clips that could not be assembled.

Both types of thinking - rhizomatic and clip - represent a modern alternative to linear structures with rigid axial orientation. However, for clip thinking, building integrity is not the main characteristic - it is more a set of frames, fragments that are not always interconnected, not comprehended, but recruited to quickly imprint new information in the brain, while for rhizomatic thinking, chaotic branching is a system for which the presence of many nodes is important.

Thus, the "superficiality" of the rhizome is deceptive - it is only an external display of deep connections, built chaotically and nonlinearly.

So, when studying clip thinking, no matter how new and strange this phenomenon may seem, the researcher has "fulcrum points" in the form of two types of thinking that already have a tradition of consideration and have similar features to clip thinking - stereotypical and rhizomatic thinking.

Perhaps stereotypical thinking can be considered one of the sources of clip thinking. Both stereotypical representations and clip art are manipulative tools that work on a sensory-emotional level and do not affect the fundamentals of mental activity.

Stereotypical and clip thinking give the illusion of a thought process, which, in fact, is not. In conditions of time pressure and the accelerating pace of life, they represent a simulacrum that satisfies the immediate needs of a person.

The spheres in which it is easier and faster for a person to use stereotypes and clips are connected both with the virtual (chats, exchange of stickers, sms) and with everyday space - from everyday communication to flash mobs and political manifestations. Sociocultural spheres dictate certain models of behavior in which spontaneity and irrationality, mosaicism and fragmentation come to the fore.

The rhizome is to some extent the antipode of clip thinking. This type of mental activity acts as a defense against the influence of the advertising and informational field and ensures the freedom of being in thought.

Rhizome is elitist by definition, just as the texts that gave birth to it are elite. But further study of the phenomenon of clip thinking is impossible without taking into account the rhizomatic type of information processing and opens up for humanitarian knowledge the need to build a certain educational paradigm, the purpose of which will be to change the forms and methods of presenting information in the information society.