Digital Literacy: A Demand for Nonlinear Thinking Styles

Abstract

Abstract: This paper makes a case for a direct relationship between digital literacy and nonlinear thinking styles, articulates a demand for nonlinear thinking styles in education and the workplace, and states implications for a connection between nonlinear thinking styles visual literacy, and intuitive artistic practice. In July of 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think. ” In this article, Bush discusses the huge amounts of information and knowledge being obtained and stored by humanity. He argued that the process society promoted of obtaining information was set to a linear manner or what he called “the artificiality of systems of indexing ” (p.11). This system was defined as artificial because it went against the natural associative/nonlinear process of the human mind for accessing information (Bush, 1945). The Internet, a construct that is designed to be accessed and comprehended in an associative/nonlinear manner, provides the system Bush so much desired. As a result, the Internet has created a demand for nonlinear thinking styles. The literature states that nonlinear thinking styles are a necessary skill within the larger theoretical framework of digitally literacy