When I write something here, it is duly indexed with all of the other material on the web. My ideas wait for someone who is looking for something, anything, concerning a particular topic. They happen upon what I’ve said on that topic and it may add value or it may not, but it is information created, stored, transmitted and received. I, in turn, take what I need from the web daily. To say that it’s expanded the way I think is an understatement. It’s changed the way my brain works. No longer to I need to retain trivia. Practically any fact I could ever need is at my fingertips.
In a sense, people have always been nodes of information. We’ve just never been so connected like this before. It seems to me that the distance between the nodes has been shrinking. From smoke signals to pony express to talking face to face, information has been moved from person to person with varying degrees of efficiency. Now, not only is information created, but it’s stored outside of a mind, outside of a book, outside of anything we’ve ever had before and perfectly organized on top of it.
This whole process even has different means of expression. There are blogs, and wikis and web pages. And let’s not forget cell phones, they spread information too. Everything is seemly instantly available. Except that it’s not.
That’s the next step: instantaneous communication of the nodes. It’s the creation of a brain within a brain. It’s a true collective unconscious in the form of a bio-mechanical linking of everyone’s minds. It might be your thought, but as soon as you think it, it’s my thought too, if I need it. If I have an observation or thought or I reach a conclusion that another person needs, it will be there. That’s the ultimate incarnation of the concept that information should be free. Not only will it be free, it will be compelled upon us. Like some sort of shared processing program like Seti-at-home, humans will start working, perhaps unconsciously together, at some greater goal.
Perhaps it will be to create a means to improve our lot or perhaps it will be to make another Dukes of Hazard movie, but whatever the result, we will all be closer than ever before.
Mental Interface 
February 12, 2007 at 4:54 am
The acceleration of communication has occured through a network of digital communication. Social networks get scrambled and reconnected in ways never before seen. Wikis, blogs, RSS, social bookmarks, and friends transform communication into something beyond what e-mail, IM, and discussion boards provide. We gain more input by choosing our output.
The new Yahoo! pipes service allows users to give output from one feed as input ot another. This allows for more creativity and imagination to scramble the network further still. I wonder what suprises await us around the next bend.
February 13, 2007 at 11:25 am
“instantaneous communication of the nodes.”
I have quite a lot of personal experience that says this is the case anyway and always has been. The fact that we don’t usually know that consciously is the problem. As we expose our “knowledge” about things for what it is (read smoke screen) we will accelerate into using this “instantaneous communication of the nodes” far more consciously. Hopefully that will lead us to use it wisely but who knows what our choices will be in that regard.
February 13, 2007 at 9:42 pm
“I had recorded this for my kids. Then a post on Scottfree2b’s blog made me upload it and post a comment. Then, I thought, why should he have all the fun? He’ll probably think it’s spam!”
🙂 Well I wasn’t too sure so I came here to check it out. Love it. And hey, thanks for the example of my earlier point.
April 12, 2008 at 7:14 pm
[…] written in the past how we are all nodes. We get more connected every day. But not all of us speak the same language and not all of us […]