Saturday, January 21, 2006

Big Bang Thinking


We all know about the power of hyperlinks to tell a media-rich story. But what about the thinking process it creates? Or how about the thinking process of the people who create cross media content? Are they right brainers or lateral thinkers or just ordinary people trying to do their job? Some people who think in a more linerar fashion may call cross-media creators " scattered", lacking focus. Others, such as marketing guru Linda Kaplan Thaler in her book Bang says that lateral thinkers are more capable of coming up with "Big Bang" ideas because they are "discontinuously innovative."

" They reject the idea of incremental or evolutionary thinking and instead look for step-change solutions. They alter the landscape forever by introducing a way of thinking about a product or service that did not exist previously and that changes our entire pattern of behavior and attitudes about it. "

Thaler's advertising agency, Kaplan Thaler Group, came up with the highly successful concept for the AFLAC duck.

But is all this plethora of information leading us to lose the forest to the leaves" in the words of an internet blogger? Or is hyperlinked story telling another way to organize the massive amounts of information that now bombard us?

If Darwin were alive he would probably study how the homo sapien cognitive process is beginning to evolve. Instead of studying birds and beaks on isolated islands in the Galapagos he would probably study hyperlinks and the cognitive process of people who create and peruse cross media.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a (choose one or more) lateral thinker, ADD person, scatterbrain, creative mind, etc, I have to say that it's sometimes pretty boring to talk to someone whose mind does not operate this way. It can be very useful to collaborate with linear thinkers when there is a linear task at hand, but honestly, linear conversations that don't have a predetermined topic feel to me like driving a racecar at 15 mph.