It is a perennial issue of philosophy and psychology whether to entertain an entirely centrifugal or rather a centripetal way of thought when considering the relationship of societal communicative patterns, language and thought, community and the individual. This is a central issue not only because it relates to the origins of knowledge and communicative patterns, but also because it touches upon the issues of active agency and the initiative moments in cognitive organization and its changes. Along this line, present-day technologies of communication raise many basic issues regarding the origins of relatively stable human cognitive architectures. Overall conceptions of architecture like the one proposed by Merlin Donald emphasize that cognitive architectures depend on information technologies, and propose a Russian doll-like system of consecutive architectures, the experience-based episodic, the expressive movement-based mimetic, and the language-based mythic cultures. According to this view, communicative patterns and cognitive structures emerge simultaneously, together with radical changes in brain architectures. However, the fourth culture defined by Donald, theoretical culture based on writing, entails flexible changes in architecture that are emulating basic architectural innovations in their speed and automatic processing. 

Present-day radical changes in the communicative ecology create an environment where further soft changes of architecture appear. The most striking of these are the mental representations of changes related to space, communicative availability and time. On the basis of our questionnaire research on communicative usage including some personality variables, conducted together with Attila Krajcsi and Kristóf Kovács, we obtained some interesting patterns relating to the changing representation of space, personal distance and the temporal dimensions of communication. The use of new tools seems to cluster into different personal patterns: the contact-centred use seems to be clearly differentiated from the instrumental use, and in the instrumental realm the uses seem to be differentiated in time on the basis of practical considerations, like costs, etc. 

The new technologies also raise basic issues regarding the types of knowledge preferred by our culture. Skills of the doer may well become skills of the knower. Easier access to explicit declarative knowledge raises the issue of the relationships of knowing what and knowing how types of knowledge in a new perspective. In the same way as in cognitive psychology implicit knowledge and procedural ‘know how’ become central in explaining behaviour, the importance of navigatory knowledge in its most general sense, and knowing when to be explicit and when to be implicit and intuitive, become crucial when using the new communicative tools. It seems that even if the new kind of communication might not change our mind now, it may help us to change the way we think about the mind.