[Air-l] Web and thought

[Nancy Baym]

A colleague of mine sends the following query. If anyone has good 
tips please pass them on to him, Thank you. Nancy


>From: "Allan Hanson" <hanson at ku.edu>
>To: "Nancy Baym" <nbaym at ku.edu>
>Subject: Bibliographic request

...

>   One of my arguments is that keyword searching tends to give a 
>number of results that are fairly high in information (in the 
>technical sense of information theory...unpredictability), and that 
>can be conducive to new insights and creative thinking as the user 
>tries to figure out why certain results were returned.  It seems to 
>me that this is somewhat similar to surfing the web, where people 
>may be stimulated to think about things in new ways as they go from 
>site to site and, in the process, encounter ways of approaching 
>things that had not occurred to them before.  I haven't been able to 
>find anything about how web surfing affects the way people think 
>about things.  Do you know of anything that has been done along 
>those lines?
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Allan
>
>Allan Hanson
>Professor of Anthropology


-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org