"Clip thinking" is a modern phenomenon

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

The article examines the socio-psychological phenomenon of "clip thinking", provides the historical aspect of its emergence in foreign and domestic literature, gives an interpretation and features of its manifestation in everyday life, and also touches on the topical question: "Is it necessary to fight clip thinking !?"

Hearing the word "clip", people, more often than not, connect it with music, video, and this is not accidental, because in translation from English. "Сlip" - "clipping; clipping (from the newspaper); excerpt (from the film), cutting ".

The word "clip" refers the reader to the principles of constructing music videos, more precisely to those varieties where the video sequence is loosely connected with each other images.

The clip worldview is also built according to the principle of constructing a music video, that is, a person perceives the world not as a whole, but as a series of almost unrelated parts, facts, events.

The owner of clip thinking finds it difficult, and sometimes is not able to analyze any situation, because her image does not linger in thoughts for a long time, it disappears almost immediately, and a new one immediately takes its place (endless switching of TV channels, watching news, advertisements, movie trailer, reading blogs …)

Currently, the media actively exaggerate the word "clip" in the context of thinking. This phenomenon did not happen at once, the very term "clip thinking" appeared in the philosophical and psychological literature back in the late 90s. XX century and denoted the peculiarity of a person to perceive the world through a short, vivid message, embodied in the form of either a video clip (hence the name) or TV news [1].

Initially, it was the media, and not the World Wide Web, that developed a universal format for presenting information - the so-called sequence of topical clips. The clip, in this case, is a short set of theses submitted without defining the context, since, due to its relevance, the context for the clip is objective reality. Thus, a person is able to freely perceive and interpret the clip due to the fact that he is immersed in this very reality.

In fact, not everything is as beautiful as it looks at first glance, because, due to the fragmented presentation of information and the separation of related events in time, the brain simply cannot be aware of and comprehend the connections between events. The format of the media forces the brain to make a fundamental error of comprehension - to consider events related if they have a temporal affinity, and not factual. Therefore, it is not surprising that the emergence of clip thinking is a response to the increased amount of information.

Confirmation of this can be found in the theory of the stages of development of civilization by M. McLuhan: “… society, being at the present stage of development, is transformed into an“electronic society”or“global village”and sets, through electronic means of communication, a multidimensional perception of the world. The development of electronic means of communication returns human thinking to the pre-text era, and the linear sequence of signs ceases to be the basis of culture”[3].

Abroad, the term "clip thinking" is replaced by a broader one - "clip culture", and is understood in the works of the American futurologist E. Toffler as a fundamentally new phenomenon, considered as a component of the general information culture of the future, based on the endless flashing of information segments and comfortable for people of the corresponding mindset. In his book "The Third Wave" E. Toffler describes clip culture in the following way: “… on a personal level, we are besieged and blinded by contradictory and irrelevant fragments of the imagery series, which knock out the ground from under the feet of our old ideas, bombard us with torn, meaningless“clips”, instant shots” [4, p. 160].

Clip culture forms such unique forms of perception as "zapping" (English zapping, channel zapping - the practice of switching TV channels), when by non-stop switching TV channels a new image is created, consisting of scraps of information and fragments of impressions. This image does not require the connection of imagination, reflection, comprehension, all the time there is a "reboot", "renewal" of information, when everything initially seen without a temporary break loses its meaning, becomes obsolete.

In domestic science, the first to use the term "clip thinking" is the philosopher-archaeo-avant-gardist F. I. Girenok, believing that conceptual thinking has ceased to play an important role in the modern world: “… you asked what is happening in philosophy today, and there is a replacement of linear, binary thinking with nonlinear. European culture is built on a system of evidence. Russian culture, since its Byzantine roots, is based on a display system. And we educated ourselves, perhaps after I. Damaskin, an understanding of pictures. We formed in ourselves not conceptual thinking, but, as I call it, clip thinking, … responding only to a blow”[2, p. 123].

In 2010, culturologist K. G. Frumkin [5] identifies five premises that gave rise to the phenomenon of "clip thinking":

1)the acceleration of the pace of life and the increase in the volume of information flow directly related to it, which gives rise to the problem of selection and reduction of information, highlighting the main thing and filtering out excess;

2)the need for greater relevance of information and the speed of its receipt;

3)increasing the variety of incoming information;

4)an increase in the number of cases that one person deals with at the same time;

5) the growth of dialogicity at different levels of the social system.

In general, the epithet "clip thinking" during its existence has acquired a pronounced negative connotation, most often adolescents and young people are "awarded" to them, it is believed that this type of thinking is catastrophic, because they read in snatches, listen to music in a car, via the phone, i.e..e. receive information by pulses, not focusing on ideas, but only on individual flashes and images. But is it really that bad and is it really only teenagers, young people who are subject to clip thinking?

Consider the positive (+) and negative (-) sides of clip thinking:

I)

- yes, with clip thinking, the world around you turns into a mosaic of disparate, little related facts, parts, fragments of information. A person gets used to the fact that they constantly, like in a kaleidoscope, replace each other and constantly demand new ones (the need to listen to new music, chat, constantly “surf” the network, edit pictures, excerpts from action films, play online games with new members …);

+ but, there is also the other side of the coin: clip thinking can be used as a protective reaction of the body to information overload. If we take into account all the information that a person sees and hears during the day, plus the "worldwide dump" Internet, then there is nothing surprising in the fact that his thinking changes, adjusts, adapts to the new world;

II)

- yes, among adolescents and students, "clip-like" is manifested more clearly and this is connected, firstly, with the fact that they are "in sight" of teachers who require them to read primary sources, take notes, and when they do not do this, it begins search for interactive teaching methods and impact; secondly, with the global informatization of society and the incredibly accelerated rate of information exchange over the past ten years, which instills in a teenager confidence in a quick, simple solution to a difficult problem for him: why go to the library to take and then read War and Peace, when it is enough to open Google, find, download from the network and watch the film adaptation of the novel, and not by Sergei Bondarchuk, but by Robert Dornhelm;

+ clip thinking is a vector in the development of a person's relationship with information, which arose not yesterday and will not disappear tomorrow;

III)

- yes, clip thinking assumes simplification, i.e. “Takes” the depth of assimilation of the material (using the word “depth” involuntarily recalls the story of P. Suskind “Thrust to the depth” and what happened to this “craving”!);

+ clip thinking gives dynamism to cognitive activity: we often find ourselves in a situation where we remember something, but are not completely sure of the accuracy of information reproduction;

Iv)

- yes, the ability to analyze and build long logical chains is lost, the consumption of information is equated with the absorption of fast food;

+ but the great classic L. N. Tolstoy said: "Short thoughts are so good because they make the serious reader think for himself."

The list can be continued, one thing is clear, clip thinking has not only drawbacks - it's just the development of some cognitive skills at the expense of others. This is a phenomenon inherent, according to Larry Rosen [6], to the “I” generation raised in the era of the boom in computer and communication technologies - their increased ability to multitask. Children of the Internet generation can simultaneously listen to music, chat, surf the net, edit photos while doing their homework. But, of course, the price to pay for multitasking is absent-mindedness, hyperactivity, attention deficit, and a preference for visual symbols for logic and delving into text.

There is no unambiguous definition of clip thinking, but from all of the above it follows: "clip thinking" is a process of reflecting many different properties of objects, without taking into account the connections between them, characterized by the fragmentation of the information flow, illogicality, complete heterogeneity of the incoming information, high speed of switching between parts, fragments information, lack of a holistic picture of the perception of the surrounding world.