"Mappa Mundi Magazine maps the

"Mappa Mundi Magazine maps the journey from data to understanding, revealing invisible worlds of information on the way."

Navigate with The Brain

Memory palaces

Spatial positioning of thoughts as an aid to memory turns out to mirror our natural thought processes of cognition. Placing objects in places to find them again is the very essence of how we navigate the real world. Memory palaces are maps of thoughts and are used to navigate the world of ideas just as cartographic maps are used to navigate the world of things. With our modern computer networks, the imaginary and the real world merge into a new place, the Internet.

A Shared Reality

The Internet is a network of many metaphors. The core infrastructure supports many protocols, and each protocol adopts a metaphor. Electronic mail uses analogies taken from a postal service. Streaming media started with a radio metaphor before evolving into a unique medium. The World Wide Web is also a metaphor–pages in an infinite book.

What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context.

Consensual hallucinations require considerable preparation. Maps are a shared version of reality. Once the infrastructure to share reality is in place, maps will flourish. Until then, maps of the Internet will be cartographic fiction, the creative musings of poets rather than shared constructions of reality.

I plan to spend a LOT of time navigating this site. Wow.

Posted by Jay Cross at April 6, 2001 09:44 AM | TrackBack