Greetings Economists, A photograph can be described as a non-linear sheet of pixels with a 'network' of lines interconnecting those pixels. This is one reason that a picture has physical properties that written language cannot duplicate or display realistically. It is a long historical problem to make pictures work like human thinking. To overcome the problem of producing motion like pictures, 5,000 years ago symbols where invented to reproduce the sound of language in a linear fashion.
The problem of writing a non-linear language is related to in human use, the problem of location, and real time knowing. So we might soon have chips that contain many chip processors, we don't yet have a culture that expresses for people in their location knowledge of the non-linear processes of networked information. Virtually all the cultural experience of creating knowledge is by the linear properties of 'writing' knowledge we use in every day life. Hence we run up against profound barriers of what is at issue when two humans collaborate. We can imagine how machines would aid the process in a non-linear way. We have a hard time putting into context what could possibly be of value in that networking process on a large scale aside from distributing movies quickly and cheaply. The basic issue is really to exchange images rapidly and to add network knowledge to all that is being exchanged. This sense of the network is happening gradually as the tools develop, but the conceptual foundation for this in the left is still lacking interest in the problem. One can summarize in a few words, that a networked society exchanges pictures in a language like way. Or re-said, in real time one can associate ordinary material life to exchanging pictures of what we are thinking about. Therefore, as it were supplanting words with images and other sensations. Doyle
