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“THE LABRYNTH:A MAZE OF ENIGMATIC and BEWILDERING COMPLEXITY”

16 March, 2008

If anyone remembers the movie, starring David Bowie. The Labrynth can be a terrifying and eerie place.

Go Here to see for yourself… http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/

So after viewing that you’ll be one of two people. You’ll either hold a majority perspective that the networking of nodes in html is a very easy and beneficial system of presenting information. Or, you’ll hold a similar opinion to mine that disagrees with this view.

Now the PSYCHOLOGICAL idea of the symantic network is well-supported and hard to disagree with. Humans do, indeed, connect oncoming information about the world to other similar connected strands of information. Sometimes the relationship is less obvious than others. For example, One likens the word “door” with the word “car”. This could be understood in the obvious sense that a car does have a door. Or it can be associated with an accident that individual had with a door. and the word accident itself as related to cars, due to the common relationship of the two.

It is a strange system that our brain creates for the sake of remembering large amounts of information.

For an extreme example go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NROegsMqNc

So just because we understand our brains to function in this way does not necessarily mean it will be an easier system to follow when applied to the internet. Firstly, when we read, our brains are active in the temporal lobe. Whereas, the area for remembering (which is required for semantic networking) is the pre-frontal cortex which can frequently be seen rubbed when a person is trying to remember. Because the two functions reside in disparate quadrants of the brain they are separate, therefore, the same experience does not apply for the individual on-line. There are also navigational issues, It is complicated going back to a thought once you have left it. And increasingly harder to resist the temptation to click on any word that you find interesting before you have fully read the article for the word you just clicked on.

A question I pose to you now is… “Do you think that the brains ability to connect semantic information in a complexly categorised manor is due to the inception of literacy?

-Stay tuned same time next week for my article on Hypertext, Theory and Criticism-

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