Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into New

Media Technologies
http://con.sagepub.com

The Case for Lateral Thinking: Discerning New Thought Patterns on the
Contemperary Info-Sphere
Peter Braunstein
Convergence 1999; 5; 10
DOI: 10.1177/135485659900500102
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The Case for Lateral Thinking

Discerning New Thought Patterns
Contemperary Info-Sphere

on

the

Peter Braunstein
This passing century has seen the widespread implementation of the
telephone, radio and television, supplemented in the last 20 years by
the personal computer and its digital companions the fax, the cell
phone, the beeper, voice mail, and e-mail. Information flow seems
torrential, the pace of our lives seems strained to the breaking point,
and the common turn-of-the-century tendency to envision chaos centres
once again on the problem of media saturation - now termed
information overload. Educators, cultural critics, and technosceptics
are all asking the question: what are the side-effects of living and
learning in an expanding and totalising media environment, a world of
instantaneous communication and information saturation?

the structure of our information sphere continues

the attempt to assert a new mastery over the
information environment is posing new burdens on our intellectual
capacities. In fact, it is this very issue - the effect of technology and
media saturation on the way we think - that is becoming one of the
most contested areas of inquiry into todays information culture. There is
presently much speculation and mounting evidence that growing up in a
media-saturated environment is producing distinctive effects among the
under-30 generation in terms of intellectual inclinations and thought
processes. At the same time, there is little agreement as to whether
these changes constitute an evolution in thought patterns or a descent

One

is certain:

to

so

thing
change

into

as

rapidly,

thought anarchy.

tackle this nebulous issue of thought in todays media

technology sceptics and cultural critics have redeployed a terminology, invented some 30 years ago, that distinguishes
between two patterns of thought. The first form, which until recently
reigned supreme in schools, books, and cultural narratives, is vertical
thinking - the ability to follow a line of thought from beginning to end,
to think in linear patterns, or to break an idea down into its component
parts. Vertical thinking, particularly associated with the passing age of
information scarcity, is now being challenged by another way of
constructing knowledge called lateral thinking. Superficially, lateral
thinking tends to resemble the hyperlink structure of the World Wide
Web - its strength lies in drawing associations between diverse ideas
and images and framing information in inventive, creative patterns.
In

an

attempt

environment,

to

some

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11

According to Dr. Edward de Bono, the noted thinking expert who

coir~et3 this terminology back in 1967, vertical thinking is about
processing: we have some starting concepts, which are usually taken
for granted, which we build on. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, is
more

concerned with perception, with examining and if necessary,

changing these starting concepts and principles.&dquo; Vertical thinking is

best exemplified by the straight-arrow logic of the syllogism: a b, b
c. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, revels in creative
c, so a
juxtapositions and free association: dog > dagma ~ religion > Buddha.
Vertical thinking attained dominance as a thought pattern in the now
passing age of information scarcity. In pre-industrial America, demand
for information greatly exceeded the supply, due in large part to low
literacy rates and the absence of a pervasive non-print medium like
radio or television. Early American history is filled with sometimes
comic, sometimes embarrassing events provoked by the slow pace of
information circulation. For example, the peace treaty ending the War
of 1812 between the USA and Britain was signed on 24 December
1814. Two weeks later, Andrew Jackson fought (and won) the Battle of
=

New Orleans - he hadnt yet heard that the war was over. It took a
week for New Yorkers to learn of George Washingtons death in
December 1799, whereas it is estimated that in1963, 68 per cent of
the USA population was informed of Kennedys assassination within the
first half hour.

information was in short supply, and consequently endowed with what

could be called scarcity value. The thought pattern known as vertical
thinking emerged in an information scarcity environment in which the
written word was placed on a pedestal. Robert McClintock, Director of
the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) at Columbia University,
argues that the very orientation of our present educational system,
centred as it is around subject matter and not students, was conceived
in an atmosphere of information scarcity where the text was considered
sacred: Many critics complain that textbooks are too central in the
process of schooling. Their complaints miss the mark. Schools as they
exist were invented to take advantage of the possibility, arising with the
spread of printing, that both students and teachers could always have
an appropriate text for any educational encounter. The centrality of the
text determines the entire design of the system.~ A climate of
information scarcity provided the preconditions for vertical thinking by
elevating the text to sacred status and devaluing the information
consumer in the process. Later in the nineteenth century, industrialisation
and the factory system - by prizing logic, sequence, linearity, and order
gave vertical thinking its present, streamlined form.
-

Vertical

thinking triumphed,

and became enshrined, in

century educational system built to resemble the

late nineteenth-

factory system.

Knowledge was, first of all, compartmentalised, identified, and placed

in distinct disciplines of thought that facilitated absorption of the
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12

subject matter designated history, sociology, etc. Knowledge was, in

addition, arranged in a predetermined, lockstep sequence that may
have seemed arbitrary to the student but made sense in the overall
university-cum-factory plan: biology one year, chemistry the next. As
Robert Mc~lini~ock observes, To package the culture for presentation
through texts, we cut the life of the mind into pieces, put defining covers
around each, and doled them out one by one.&dquo; Vertical thinking, then,
established its hegemony through this categorisation of knowledge. As
De Bono puts it, in vertical thinking when we come across something
we seek to analyze it to determine which standard box, or category, it
fits into.4 It is no surprise that the vertical system, structured as it is
around sequential subject-matter, tended to favour absorption of
material rather than discovering the interrelatedness of diverse subjects.
This was perhaps the greatest legacy of the industrial system: the
encouragement of rote memory over integrative thinking, a preference
enforced by tests that probed, according to McClintock, how
completely the student has learned those materials that authority deems

essential, required.
until1967 that the phrase lateral thinking would come into
That
vogue.
year, de Bono first coined the term as a corrective to what
he called the exclusive emphasis on vertical thinking in our cultures6
According to de Bono, vertical thinkings emphasis on logical,
methodical inquiry is based on the certainty that one may reach a
conclusion by a valid series of steps. Because of the soundness of the
steps one is arrogantly certain of the correctness of the conclusion.
Unfortunately, vertical thinking tends to rely heavily, and often
exclusively, on such analytical methods for problem-solving, but then
finds itself unable to generate alternative ideas or perspectives when
analysis fails. De Bono introduced the concept of lateral thinking as a
way of generating new perceptions and starting points in problemsolving in order to temper the arrogance of any rigid conclusion no
matter how soundly it appeared to have been worked out. He
conceived of lateral thinking not as a replacement for vertical thinking,
but as an additional thought process that would enhance its
new ideas and perspectives for
effectiveness, a way of generating
vertical thinking to develop.7
It

was not

Coincidentally, that same year witnessed the widespread

implementation of a technology that would ultimately act as the
delivery system for lateral thinking. 1967 was the heyday of the
hippie counterculture, and the hippies, always in search of sensory
enhancement to their drug and other experiences, invented an
experimental entertainment form - soon dubbed multi-media - that
would exert a profound influence on the development of new thought
patterns. The multi-media spectacle, which featured strobe lights,
projected film images, pulsating acid rock music, and a variety of
- sounc~ amplification/distortion devices, was designed to complement
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13

and cater to the LSD experience, but it quickly went mainstream.

Perfected by Ken Kesey on the West coast and Andy Warhol in New
York, the spectacle was an implementation of Marshall McLuhans
concept of sensory overload, which, according to the philosopher,
consisted of an overpowering simultaneity that breaks the confines of
rational thought.

Multimedia successfully implemented the hippies psychic agenda: it

was their signature technology. By offering shifting perceptions and
sensory manipulation as the basis for leisure entertainment, the
counterculture creatively used technology to further its grandest utopian
ambition - the triumph of the imagination in everyday life. As the
counterculture went mainstream in the 1970s, so did the multi-media art
and entertainment forms that it championed. Music videos on emerging
entertainment networks like MTV took the multi-media format of
integrated sound/music/graphics/text as the framing device for a new
brand of content. But the pervasiveness of multi-media today is due in
larger part to the overall proliferation of media since1980. As
television gave birth to cable television, accompanied by new
information nexuses like the internet, information providers found
themselves on the losing end of a supply-demand equation: the supply
of information was growing exponentially while demand remained
constrained. In direct opposition to the days of information scarcity,
information has been recently devalued and the information consumer
placed in an unprecedented position of power in terms of content
control. In this new environment, multimedia has emerged as a
formidable means of presenting information in an alluring format that
attracts the attention of the deluged information consumer.

Multimedia, defined by a multiplicity and multidirectionality of forms,

proved to be the carrier of lateral thinking and constitutes one way in

which the late twentieth-century mind is ordering a complex media
landscape. Yet lateral thinking is not only a form of mental
accommodation to media saturation, but a thought pattern long
inhibited by a rationalising society that prized logic, order, and
sequentiality. As a result, De Bonos ideal conception of lateral and
vertical thinking as cooperative thought patterns has been frustrated by
their historical origins: whereas vertical thinkings formative period was
the industrial era, lateral thinking is a child of the counterculture and
therefore viewed as somewhat subversive. On the level of appearance,
in fact, lateral thinking does in some ways represent the wayward
underside of thought that had been held in check during the long reign
of vertical thinking. An insurgent thought pattern, it often seeks to break
down the very categories that are the basis of its vertical counterpart.
Where vertical thinking excels in lockstep, debating-style arguments,
lateral thinking revels in tangents, detours and associations. Where
vertical thinking requires linear sequences, lateral thinking produces

- non-linear juxtapositions.
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14

repressed for too long - in this case, a pattern of

thought surprising that it might return with a vengeance. Given
a structure like vertical thinking thats erected on cold logic, the individual
tends to find a balancing tendency, unfortunately, in hot illogic,
irrationality, instinct, observes Steve Talbott, editor of the on-line
periodical Netfuture.8 There is no better place to assess the return of
repressed laterality than the World Wide Web, the epicentre of lateral
thinking. More than any other information nexus, the webs hyperlink
structure reveals the degree to which the power flow between information

Whenever anything is
it is not

source
once

and information seeker has shifted. Whereas the individual

was

expected to conform to the subject matter, subject matter on the web

is at the mercy of the

websurfer, who can link out

to

another site in mid-

paragraph, mid-sentence, mid-idea. Content providers, ever conscious of

the new power dynamic, have become adept at creating fast-food
content, knowing that tedious, in-depth, traditional approaches to content
are not likely to hold the attention of the average websurfer. Ana Marie
executive editor of the webzine Suck, considers the web literature
for illiterates. So you have to engage people in a different way than a
print magazine does. Were publishing cultural criticism for the attentiondeficit-disorder crowd. We know we have to engage people quickly,
intelligently and feistily. But then we have to get outta there. ~9

Cox,

= If the web provides ample demonstration of the new power dynamic of

lateral thinking that favours the individual over the subject matter, it also
delineates a new geography of thought. In an age of information
scarcity when the knowledge surface was smaller, vertical thinking
could afford to dig deep holes below the information surface. Lateral
thinking, on the other hand, thrives in todays climate in which the
information surface keeps expanding. As a result, lateral thinking stays
close to the surface and delves beneath it only as necessary. In the
Reuters News Summary site on America Online, news readers are
presented with two options: Highlights or News in Depth. Depthanalysis of a news story, mandatory in the age of vertical thinking, is
nowadays optional. Web journalism tends to function the same way.
Cox says her zine favours a horizontal, slam-dance approach to topics.
We string things together on a surface level and expect the reader to
follow along. Suck dispenses with a sequential, linear approach to
journalism in favour of a free-association of ideas. The traditional essay
introduces the topic, explains it, critiques it. We dive right into the
critique. Well take, say, five seemingly unrelated cultural events and
connect them through lateral thinking. If the readers are unfamiliar with
the topics being discussed, Cox adds, they can get the background
info through links.I1O This journalistic form will likely become more
prevalent in the age of information overload, given the ever-growing
consumer desire to regulate exposure to content.
new multi-media forms are a welcome addition to our
environment, engaging and empowering the time-pressed

To some, these

Information

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15

information consumer and enabling an unprecedented control over

Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital (Knopf, 1 ~7~5~ claims
that multimedia facilitates fluid movement from one medium to the next,
saying the same thing in different ways, calling upon one human sense
or another.&dquo; Critics of multimedia make an opposite case, however.
They argue not only that there is nothing logical about lateral thinking,
even as an adaptive process, but more crucially that the rambling,
anarchic, disconnected thought patterns produced by multimedia spell
doom for our educational system and overall intellectual environment.
T~alboth of Netfuture, discussing the use of multimedia to sell products,
argues that the style of consciousness that advertising cuttivates in us
accustoms us to crazed and senseless juxtapositions. Losing our powers
of meaningful attention, we also lose our powers of conscious decision,
and, finally, we lose ourselves. 112
content.

Educators are particularly critical of the impact of lateral thinking, and

often credit it with disrupting their ability to teach students to think and
write coherently. In general, they look fondly back on the heyday of the
book and usually target one particular media form or another as the
source of todays educational crisis. For Neil Postman, author of such
books as Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly: The Surrender of
Culture to Technology, and The End of Education, 13 the culprit is usually
television. Referring to a student who wrote a term paper filled with
contradictory statements, Postman forwards a handy explanation: This
kid was brought up on television. Television does not have a &dquo;because&dquo;
in its grammar; its a world of &dquo;ands&dquo; - &dquo;this happened and then this
happened and then this happened.&dquo; For a kid raised in this environment
there would be nothing strange about saying &dquo;hereI said this&dquo; and
&dquo;here I said the opposite&dquo;.4 The current whipping-boy for Neo-Luddites
like Postman is multimedia, whether on the web or on MTV. Professor
Gertrude Himmelfarb, writing a recent Op-Ed piece in The Chronicle of
Higher Education, claims that young people constantly exposed to
multimedia ... become unable to concentrate on mere texts, which have
only words and ideas to commend them. Worse yet, the constant
exposure to a myriad of texts, sounds, and images that often are only
tangentially related to each other is hardly conducive to the cultivation
of logical, rational, systematic habits of thought.15

Proponents of lateral thinking and the impact of multimedia, on the

other hand, focus on the adaptive, evolutionary aspects of these new
patterns of thought in the age of information overload. It is now
somewhat less important to understand the depth of a few subjects than
it is to understand how any one subject relates to a multitude of others,
claims Bill LeFurgy, editor of the internet newsletter Culture in
Cyberspace. An information-rich society demands this adaptation.
Author Douglas Rushkoff takes this line of thinking even further. In his
recent book Playing the Future: How Kids Culture Can Teach us to
Thrive in the Age of Chaos, Rushkoff claims that the under-30
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16

generation, which he calls screenagers,

are successfully adapting to

todays information climate. They constitute, in his words, the latest
model of human being, equipped with a whole lot of new features.
One of these features is lateral thinking which, as might be expected,
has developed more strongly among children nurtured in a climate of
proliferating, all-encompassing media. As a result of their media
upbringing, Rushkoff asserts,these screenagers possess a newfound
ability to navigate their own path through data and to look for patterns
and associations. For Rushkoff, the addition of lateral thinking to a
previously vertical culture is like supplementing the expertise of a
cartographer, who only looks at latitude and longitude lines, with that of
a

surfer, who can

assess wave

formations and tides. 116

While Rushkoff may be prematurely burying vertical thinking, there is

something to his idea about a generational fault-line in terms of thought
patterns. LeFurgy agrees that the younger generation are acclimated to
information overload. People under 30 are used to dealing with a
flood of information, its just a part of their life, says LeFurgy; an older
person, however, is still likely to say &dquo;Ill just find a book on the
subject&dquo;.&dquo; Indeed, teachers at all educational levels provide mounting
evidence of changes in student thought patterns that substantiate a shift
from vertical to lateral thinking. David Trask, a history professor at
Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina,
has observed what he considers a notable evolution in student thought
patterns and approaches to learning since he began teaching 27 years
ago: WhenI first started teaching, Trask recalls, I had many students
who wanted to give me lists of events in correct chronological
sequence. TodayI dont get lists from students but rather reconstructions
of past events based on what students seem to feel is the sequence in
which events &dquo;must&dquo; have happened. Trask also remarks how difficult it
is to keep class discussions on track, because student interactions seem
to work by free association. A student often will react to something I say
in a tangential direction.
like
other
has
also
observed mounting student
Trask,
educators,
many
distaste for reading and for the written word, citing a common
justification among students that they do not need to read in order to
discuss.&dquo;
in

passing and lead the discussion away

Such impressionistic evidence of lateral thinking provided by educators

has received quantitative validation by the prestigious marketing
research firm of Yankelovich Partners, who for over 20 years have
researched differences in political beliefs and cultural affinities among
generational cohorts. J. Walker Smith, Managing Partner at the firm,
has conducted much comparative research between baby boomers and
so-called GenXers, defined as those born between 1965 and 1978.
Because they have sampled from an unprecedented range of media
sources, GenXers betray a distinctive cultural affinity that Smith calls
retroeclecticism: Xers excel in making creative connections, in

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17

&dquo;linking&dquo; diverse images and content and putting them together through
analogy, by metaphor, non-sequentially, or in other combinations.9
So does lateral thinking represent an evolutionary leap in thought
processes or a descent into thought anarchy? Its a mixed bag. Even the
father of lateral thinking has his reservations. While de Bono welcomes
the incursions made by lateral thought processes, he worries that if
multimedia proceeds to become the dominant mode of information
acquisition, it will produce people who are very well informed and
highly ineffective. Lateral thinking, in de Bonos original formulation,
was meant to temper the logic-based arrogance of vertical thinking, not
replace it entirely. Simply trading one thought pattern for another may
lead to views that are absolutely as rigid as those used in traditional
linear, step-by-step logic, or may conversely lead to the formation of
patterns over which we have virtually no control. De Bonos ideal
scenario would involve complementary, cooperative thought patterns
that encourage versatile, constructive thought, not trading off a linear
mind-rut for
Notes

1
2

3
4
5
6

an

ambient one.2

Interview with Edward de Bono by Peter Braunstein, 21 November 1996.

Robbie McClintock, Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education Through
Information Technology (New York: Institute for Learning Technologies, 1992),
paragraph 172.
Robbie McClintock, Power and Pedagogy, paragraph 183.
Interview with de Bono, 21 November 1996.
McClintock, Power and Pedagogy, paragraph 188.
De Bono, Lateral Thinking: creativity step by step (New York: Harper & Row,

1970), p 13.
7 Ibid, p. 12.
8 Interview with Steve Talbott by Peter Braunstein, 28 November 1996.
9 Ana Marie Cox quoted in Culture in Cyberspace, 1 July 1996.
10 Interview with Ana Marie Cox by Peter Braunstein, 25 November 1996.
11 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), p. 72.
12 Steve Talbott, Will advertising keep the Net free? Netfuture #24, 23 July 1996

<http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1996/Ju&verbar;2396_24.htm&verbar;>.
13

Neil Postman,

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse

in

the Age of Show

(New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Neil Postman, The End of

Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage Books, 1996);
Neil Postman, Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology (New York:
Knopf, 1992).
Business

14 Interview with Neil Postman by Peter Braunstein, 20 November 1996.

15 Gertrude Himmelfarb, A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet, Chronicle of
Higher Education, 1 November 1996, A56.
16 Interview with Douglas Rushkoff by Peter Braunstein, 12 February 1997.
17 Interview with Bill LeFurgy by Peter Braunstein, 16 November 1996.
18 Interview with David Trask, 12 March 1997.
19 Interview with J. Walker Smith, January 1997.
20 Interview with de Bono, 21 November 1996.

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