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a b
Figure 7.10. two views of minds and media: a , linked minds. Squares , organisms; arrows ,
media as channels of communication. b , embedded minds. Circles , individuals; arrows ,
communication as program sharing and linguistic interaction between individuals.
source: Pask 1977, 40, figs. 1, 2.
to try out a different point of view; namely, the image of a pervasive medium
(or media) inhabited by minds in motion. Thus, media are characterized as
computing systems, albeit of a peculiar kind. But the statement neither asserts
nor denies the homogeneity of a medium. In our present state of knowledge, it
seems prudent to regard the medium as heterogeneous, and rendered modular
by the existence of specially unrestricted regions (brains, for example), capable
of acting as L [language] processors (though I have a hankering to imagine that
these regions are ultimately determined by programmatic rather than concrete
localization). It is surely true that rather powerful computerized systems greatly
reduce the differentiation of the medium and coalesce the specially restricted
modules, so that “interface barriers” are less obtrusive than they used to be [fig.
7.10b].
Here one might be tempted to think of recent work in cognitive science on
“distributed cognition”—the observation that much “mental” activity in fact
depends upon external, “non-mental” processing (e.g., Hutchins 1995). But
something more is at stake. Even with Musicolour and SAKI, Pask had been
impressed by the strength of the coupling established between human and
machine, which he argued fused them into a single novel entity: “The teach-
ing machine starts to work, in the sense that it accelerates the learning process
and teaches efficiently, just when we, as outsiders, find that it is impossible
to say what the trainee is deciding about—in other words, at the stage when
interaction between the teaching machine and the trainee has given rise to
a dynamic equilibrium which involves parts of both” (Pask 1960a, 975); “al-
though the physical demarcation of the student and the machine is definite,
the subsystems representing the student's region of control and the adaptive
machine's region of control are arbitrary and (relative to any given crite-
rion) have limits that are continually changing” (Pask and McKinnon-Wood
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