Radical Media Mind Shift In Progress

I made and used my first book for teaching metacognition to toddlers with my five year old grandson. I am following up with a few games: Challenging him to build a lego tower on a tray that will withstand shaking (what's your plan? does it work? if not, what to try?); put a mystery object in a box, ask him to identify it without looking (he can shake it, stick his hand in and feel it) and to vocalize his thought process as he does it.

I don't have to think about it for long to strongly suspect that what this five year old is learning is a harbinger of a species-wide shift: We better learn how to use AI to augment our thinking, lest it replace it. Christian Science Monitor reports on college students who refuse to use LLMs for any purpose. Without any direct knowledge, I would guess that this is a minority position. My decade of teaching college students impressed on me that love of learning is subordinated to grade-seeking. Understandable, given the uncertainty of the job market for college graduates, even back then. AI has made that worse.

I've been ruminating and investigating human mind-shifts precipitated by new media for most of my career, from Tools for Thought in 1985 to Net Smart and Mind Amplifier in 2012. tl;dr New media amplify and transmit thinking, and in the process, changes it; certain new technologies (printing presses, computers) drive the adoption and evolution of the most influential new media.

If this was earlier in my career, I'd find out how the use of Large Language Models is already influencing cognition, investigate potential literacies and modes of use that could not just ameliorate the cognition-eroding effects of chronic, widespread LLM use, but enable humans to think more effectively through the use of these tools without compromising the parts of our humanity that tend more angelic than beastly

To briefly recap the multimillenium-long coevolution of minds and media:

Orality → Literacy

From spoken memory to stable text. Writing let us store ideas outside our heads, sustain long arguments, and reference records instead of recalling performances. Alphabet enabled abstraction: symbols standing for sounds standing for objects, actions, and ideas. Alphabetic order enabled hierarchical organization schemes.

Print → Scientific Journals & “Invisible Colleges”

From books to serial discovery. Journals (e.g., Philosophical Transactions) created peer review, priority claims, methods disclosure, and replication norms. Together with the scientific method, knowledge discovery became community and trans-community enterprises. Libraries and periodicals enabled nowledge networks to drive discovery and innovation.

Mass Literacy → Broadcast Media (radio/TV)

From many small audiences to national and glocal ones. One‑to‑many media and editorial gatekeepers built shared rituals and attention economies that shaped politics and culture. (c.f., Imagined Communities, Structural Transformationof the Public Sphere, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Understanding Media)

Broadcast → Networked Hypertext & the Web

From linear pages to linked webs. Hyperlinks changed discovery and authorship; decentralized publishing and link‑driven serendipity re‑wired how we find and trust sources. Many-to-many publishing democratized journalism and propaganda, the authority of the text gave way to instant access to unreliable information.

Networked Web → Social/Collaborative Platforms

From publishing to participation. Reputation systems, real‑time feedback, smart mobs, virtual communities and peer production (wikis, open source) enabled coordination without classic editors, management hierarchies, and other gatekeepers

Collaborative Platforms → AI‑Mediated Thinking

From storage to prediction and generation. Systems now help draft, summarize, retrieve, and plan. New skills emerge—prompting, verification, tool‑chaining—and questions about authority, bias, and stewardship. Outsourcing thinking threatens cognitive skills the way the alphabet led to the minimization of memorization. The future direction of the long-sought human-computer symbiosis is a critical uncertainty: upgraded or vestigial human thinking capabilities?