Kristof Nyiri

The thesis according to which technologies of communication have implications not just for the form, but also for the content and indeed for the overall logic of what is being communicated rests on a set of general philosophical assumptions as regards the relation between thought and its medium. The paper shows that formulating these assumptions, and elaborating them, has been a characteristic concern of Austro‐Hungarian philosophy; that between the philosophers who played a role in the relevant endeavours there obtained significant, sometimes mutual, influences; and that Austro‐Hungarian realities ‐ basically, the phenomenon of disturbed communication within the Habsburg Empire ‐ had a marked effect on their thought.

Pictorial meaning involves not just resemblance, but also pictorial skills, pictorial acts, practices, and performance. Especially in the classroom setting, at all levels of education, it is essential to realize that teaching with pictures and learning through pictures is a practical enterprise where thinking is embedded in doing. Promoting visual learning means to be a visionary, and to take on an enormous educational challenge. But while adaptation and innovation are inevitable in a world where technological changes are rapidly and radically altering the learning environment, educational science and the everyday practice of education clearly need to retain a measure of conservatism. And any conservatism worth the name has to take account of visuality, visual thinking, and visual learning.

The changing conditions for the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in the age of multimedia networks make it inevitable that old philosophical problems become formulated in a new light. Above all, the problem of the unity of knowledge is once again a topical issue. The situation-dependent acquisition of knowledge that is made possible by mobile learning transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines, linking the domains of text, diagram, and picture. Database integration and multimedia search become central problems in the epistemology of the 21st century, while handheld devices are emerging as vital technologies for supporting collaborative learning. -- Kristóf Nyíri has published widely on Wittgenstein, Austrian intellectual history, and the philosophy of communication. He directs the interdisciplinary research program COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, conducted jointly by the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Westel Mobile Telecommunications, Budapest.

The paper discusses the role of networks in cognition on two levels: on the level of the organization of ideas, and on the level of interpersonal communication. Any interesting system of ideas forms a network: ideas presented in a linear order (the order forced upon us by verbal expression) will necessarily convey a distorted picture of the underlying patterns of thought. Networks of ideas typically consist of a great number of nodes with just a few links, and a small number of hubs with very many links; that is, they are, to employ Albert-László Barabási's term, "scale-free." Barabási fits into a specific tradition: Hungarians had an early influence on the philosophy of networks, and on the philosophy of communication as developed at Marshall McLuhan's Toronto Circle. In fact, this was the circle in which certain Hungarian and Austrian ideas on mediated collective thinking first came together—a telling testimony to the conditions of disturbed communication and idiosyncratic networking typical of East-Central Europe, past and present. The nodes-and-hubs pattern is characteristic, too, of social networks, in particular of scholarly and scientific networks. The paper analyses the role of "invisible colleges"—informal groups of scientific elites through whom the communication of information both within a field and across fields is channelled. By way of conclusion the notion of a new type of personality, the "network individual," is discussed: the network individual is the person reintegrated, after centuries of relative isolation induced by the printing press, into the collective thinking of society—the individual whose mind is manifestly mediated, once again, by the minds of those forming his/her smaller or larger community