How Your Travels Around the Internet Expose the Way You Think

ZOHAR LAZAR

My journey begins with a magazine article on the origins of human writing. But then I bounce to a webcomic about a girl superhero, which leads me to obsess briefly over how the hell Superman could really fly. That links me to the equations that describe gravity, which loops me around to Jews in the history of Marvel Comics.

This is a map of me dorking around on the Internet. But it also reveals something important that would otherwise be invisible. It shows how I think.

We’ve all gotten very good at sharing things we find online. From Evernote to WeChat, our tools are great for saving or broadcasting our findings, but they don’t help us recall how we found them.

Vannevar Bush thought those pathways were the most important part. In 1945 the computing pioneer wrote “As We May Think” the essay that essentially predicted the Internet. Bush envisioned a desklike device he called a memex that would display documents and pictures on a screen and let you create hyperlinks among them.

What really intrigued Bush was that you could share your “trail”—the steps that took you from one document to another. This would be different, he noted, than sharing the results of your research. You’d also be sharing the process, a glimpse into the normally invisible life of a mind at work. Bush imagined a class of superusers called trail blazers: “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected,” he wrote.

I think Bush was onto something. I recently got to try out Trailblazer, an experimental tool modeled (and named) after Bush’s concept. Created by the New Zealand startup Twingl, it’s a Chrome browser extension that creates spiderweb maps of your online activity you can revisit and share. “Browser histories are too flat,” says Andy Wilkinson, Twingl’s CEO. “This lets you, at a glance, figure out where an idea emerged from. You’re plucking off a part of your mind and handing it to someone else.”

Early users have indeed found it useful to see each other’s pathways. A group of schoolkids used Trailblazer to do research online while building Minecraft structures based on historical locations; they quickly began sharing. One built a winter prison camp, and from her trail I could see her shift from studying Nazi and North Korean ones to researching what crops grow in frigid conditions. “I started wishing I could use this in my schoolwork, because I could give the trail to my teacher to prove how I’d done something,” says Zuni, a 13-year-old girl who used Trailblazer. “Or she could show me how she finds a page.”

This is what psychologists call “metacognition,” thinking about how we think. Trailblazer gave me an x-ray view of my own mental activity. Clicking on random memes triggered a curious search query and—boom—20 pages later I’d find a useful scientific paper. (I’m now more forgiving of falling down a Twitter hole.) Traditional academic citations never capture serendipity, the stumbling, associational nature of how knowledge relates to itself. Trailblazer does.

Imagine if trail sharing became routine. Reporters could enrich their stories by showing how they came to their conclusions. You could send funny or jokey pathways, like cognitive emoji. Trails are like Proustian cookies, teleporting us back to mental states from weeks ago. Vannevar Bush was right: The journey is a destination.