While throughout history, knowledge and information have been mostly bound in language and text, new twenty-first-century media increasingly tend to break with this tradition of linear sequentiality. This paper will present an account of how this development may be explained by a relationship between the use of digital technologies on the one hand, and the (human) user’s cognitive processes on the other. This will be done by, first, outlining two existing conceptions of human cognition and, subsequently, by confronting these with observations in the field of philosophy of media, most prominently the position of Marshall McLuhan.
