Where do your digital files live? What do they look like? How big are they? Do they have a specific shape? What do you picture when you hear the term the cloud? When you think about the things you interact with in the digital world, it’s likely the images that come to mind are associated with office work. The most widely adopted metaphor for interacting with the digital content we create and work with is the desktop. Your mental images of the intangible assets in your digital world are derived from analogous, representational objects in the real world, such as documents, folders, filing cabinets, and safes.

The desktop metaphor was introduced on the Xerox Star workstation in 1980 and quickly popularized by Apple with the introduction of the Lisa in 1983 and the Macintosh in 1984. Microsoft followed in 1990 with the release of Windows 3.0 which introduced its desktop based user interface design. The desktop metaphor and its associated objects, such as documents and folders, are what psychologists call cognitive artifacts—substitutes for the information captured in bits scattered across your local storage system (the hard drive or solid state memory in your computing device) or the storage of one or more remote computing systems somewhere online. These representations are carefully designed symbols that communicate the minimum amount of information required for us to form an association with the relevant real-world object—just enough for us to sense its purpose and how to interact with it. They give us a virtual handle on our endlessly multiplying, distributed collections of digital content (our photos, videos, documents, music, ebooks, and other information-based objects).

But the desktop metaphor is losing its lock on how we interact with our digital content and imagine the digital world. Many of the apps and services we now use on our PCs and mobile devices integrate and manage our information. You don’t need to know how to handle the content in these apps and services—it’s just always there. You’re no longer forced to interact with your digital information through representational objects like documents and folders.

Redrawing Our Mental Model of Digital Space

This emerging paradigm redraws our mental model of digital space. It’s no longer a hierarchically organized collection of static, representational objects. Instead, it’s a dynamic, ever-changing media space where our thoughts take shape. It’s defined by our areas of interest and the things we can do with our content: create, edit, read, watch, listen, share, annotate, search, organize.

Digital content is becoming more and more like thought itself. It exists in a space that is both real and not real, fluid and ever-changing, both ephemeral and permanent. We increasingly interact with our content using tools designed to capture and manipulate our thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not always fully formed or logical. In other words, we are thinking with digital information in the same way we think with the thoughts we store in our head.

Our endlessly multiplying collections of digital content (our photos, videos, documents, music, ebooks, and other information-based objects) now live in a shadowy realm, somewhere between our physical world and the abstract realm of intangible ideas. But more and more frequently, we feel its rough edges: the border territory between where our information actually lives and our sense that our digital content is a physical presence in our lives, that we can get our hands on it.

This feeling is made manifest by the plethora of Internet connected digital devices we interact with throughout the day. The scale of our engagement with these devices is driving the creation of a new reality. In his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, William Gibson used the term “cyberspace” to describe the "consensual hallucination” that’s the primary setting for the story. Cyberspace (which differs from virtual reality*) can’t be mapped on paper, but we have a constantly evolving mental model of it in our head—one we share with others as we communicate, work, and play together in the digitally enabled virtual world. You don’t need a headset or special glasses to feel it… Brick by brick, we are building out a new reality as we work and play in the digital world, independently and in our shared lives online.

The Impact of Digital Imaging

It’s not only the introduction of purpose-built apps and services that’s changing the way we think about and work in the digital world. Smartphones and digital imaging are also playing an important role. It’s estimated there are over 6.64 billion smartphone users in the world today, that’s over 83% of the world’s population.** It’s also estimated over 90% of the 1.4 trillion digital photos taken in 2021 were captured with a smartphone—that’s 1.26 trillion photos.*** We are awash in digital photos.

In addition, services like Canva and Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) are making it easy for people without a design background to create sophisticated graphics, dramatically increasing the number and quality of images in nearly everything in our online and physical environments. Next up is the widespread use of AI-driven image generation tools such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney that can create an infinite variety of images from simple text prompts. While AI image generation is still in the early stages of development, Microsoft recently announced they will integrate the DALL-E2 AI image creation engine into a new tool called Microsoft Designer which will be included in the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools.****

What does this all mean? More and more information is going to be conveyed through images. Many of us will learn how to use these tools to create new images and graphics, but all of us are going to have to improve our ability to think with images.

Verbal vs. Visual Thinking

When it comes to communication, language is the water we drink, the air we breathe.

—Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking

Our ability to think and communicate using language is the core of our identity as a species. “I think, therefore I am” the philosopher René Descartes wrote—the words themselves proving his claim. By nature and training, most of us lean toward language-based thinking (“verbal thinking”) as opposed to thinking with pictures (“visual thinking”). These two cognitive styles are not mutually exclusive—most of us have a mix of verbal and visual thinking skills. But the distinction between the two is important, especially as the tools for creating and manipulating digital art and graphics are democratized in the same way that the camera phone democratized photography.

In her book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, the scientist, academic, and animal behaviorist Temple Grandin writes the following about verbal thinkers:

Word-based thinking is sequential and linear. People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is why they often do well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially.

Verbal thinkers tend to be good at:

• Understanding general concepts

• Logic and reasoning

• Explaining the steps they take to arrive at an answer or to make a decision

• Organizing

• Sensing and working with time

• Expressing themselves with words

Visual thinkers, Grandin explains:

. . . see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all.

Visual thinkers tend to be good at:

• Solving problems

• Using their intuition and emotions

• Dealing with ambiguity

• Grasping how mechanical devices work

• Building and putting things together

• Math that’s directly related to practical tasks

In contrast to verbal thinking, which is linear and sequential (moving from one word, idea, or step to another), visual thinking is associative. One image leads to the next in a nonlinear, associative fashion. We see an image and it reminds us of another image or memory. Verbal thinking progresses in steps, visual thinking in leaps. Because of the way our brain works, verbal thinking focuses on individual elements, visual thinking focuses on the whole. In verbal thinking, we break things down into their components and analyze them. Verbal thinking leads us toward conclusions. When we think visually, we see the relationships and connections between things and synthesize them into a new whole. Visual thinking helps us think more holistically, and more inclusively.

Those of us who are primarily verbal learners and thinkers are going to have to learn how to think visually as we grapple with evermore complex ideas that are best expressed visually. The journey begins with a simple phrase: “Now, picture this…”

Try This Thinking Styles Tool

The tool below helps you learn where you fall on the spectrum of verbal (language based) and visual (picture based) thinkers. It was developed by the psychologist Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and the Gifted Development Center in Denver.

Answer Yes or No to each of the following 18 questions:

1. Do you think mainly in pictures instead of in words?

2. Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?

3. Do you solve problems in unusual ways?

4. Do you have a vivid imagination?

5. Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?

6. Are you terrible at spelling?

7. Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?

8. Are you organizationally impaired?

9. Do you often lose track of time?

10. Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?

11. Do you remember how to get to places you visited only once?

12. Is your handwriting slow and difficult for others to read?

13. Can you feel what others are feeling?

14. Are you musically, artistically, or mechanically inclined?

15. Do you know more than others think you know?

16. Do you hate speaking in front of a group?

17. Did you feel smarter as you got older?

18. Are you addicted to your computer?

If you answered Yes to ten or more of the questions, you’re likely to lean toward visual-spatial learning and thinking. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle on the continuum. We have a blend of verbal and visual thinking skills that we call on as needed in different contexts and circumstances.

If you want to spend a little more time exploring your visual-spatial abilities, you can try this 30 minute test offered by Psychology Today.

Footnotes

* The term “cyberspace” refers to the global domain that encompasses the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and other network connected devices. The term “virtual reality” is used to refer to specific simulated reality environments, or virtual worlds. “The metaverse” is a more recent kind of virtual reality experience—one that gives users the ability to create and modify the environment itself.

** Source: BankMyCell

*** Source: Mylio and Rise Above Research

**** I’ll be writing about these tools and other AI-driven content creation tools in an upcoming article.