[Chapter-delegates] How is the Internet changing the way you think?

[Franck Martin]

http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_print.html 

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ... 

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. 

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing? 

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear? 

Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?". 

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them? 

Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species — informavores? — he asks. 

W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks? 

What do you think? 
--- 

172 essayists (an array of world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers) have created a 132,000 document. They are: 

Maria Abramovic, Anthony Aguirre, Alan Alda, Alun Anderson, Chris Anderson, Noga Arikha, Scott Atran, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Albert-László Barabási, Simon Baron-Cohen, Samuel Barondes, Thomas A. Bass, Yochai Benkler, Jesse Bering, Jamshed Bharucha, Nick Bilton, Sue Blackmore, Paul Bloom, Giulio Boccaletti, Stefano Boeri, Lera Boroditsky, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Rodney Brooks, David M. Buss, Jason Calacanis, William Calvin, Philip Campbell, Nicholas Carr, Sean Carroll, Leo Chalupa, Nicholas Christakis, George Church, Andy Clark, June Cohen, Tony Conrad, Douglas Coupland, James Croak, M. Csikszentmihalyi, Fiery Cushman, David Dalrymple, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey De Grey, Stanislas Dehaene, Daniel Dennett, Emanuel Derman, Keith Devlin, Peter Diamandis, Chris DiBona, Eric Drexler, Jesse Dylan, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, David Eagleman, Olafar Eliasson, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Daniel Everett, Paul Ewald, Hu Fang, Christine Finn, Eric Fischl, Helen Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Richard Foreman, Fabrizo Gallanti, Howard Gardner, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Ralph Gibson, Gerd Gigerenzer, Ian & Joel Gold, Nigel Goldenfeld, Alison Gopnik, April Gornik, Joshua Greene, Haim Harari, Judith Rich Harris, Sam Harris, Daniel Haun, Marc Hauser, Marti Hearst, Virginia Heffernan, W. Daniel Hillis, Donald Hoffman, Bruce Hood, Nick Isaac, Xeni Jardin, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Jon Kleinberg, Brian Knutson, Terence Koh, Stephen Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Andrian Kreye, Jaron Lanier, Joseph LeDoux, Andrew Lih, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, Lynn Margulis, John Markoff, Marissa Mayer, Tom McCarthy, Jonas Mekas, Thomas Metzinger, Geoffrey Miller, Dave Morin, Evgevny Morozov, David Myers, Tor Nørretranders, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James O'Donnell, Tim O'Reilly, Gloria Origgi, Neri Oxman, Mark Pagel, Gregory Paul, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford Pickover, Stuart Pimm, Steven Pinker, Ernst Pöppel, Emily Pronin, Robert Provine, Steve Quartz, Raqs Media Collective, Lisa Randall, Martin Rees, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Matt Ridley, Matthew Ritchie, Rudy Rucker, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Paul Saffo, Scott D. Sampson, Larry Sanger, Robert Sapolsky, Roger Schank, Peter Schwartz, Charles Seife, Terrence Sejnowski, Robert Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Clay Shirky, Barry Smith, Laurence Smith, Lee Smolin, Galia Solomonoff, Linda Stone, Seirian Sumner, Tom Standage, Victoria Stodden, Nassim Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Frank Tipler, Fred Tomaselli, John Tooby, Arnold Trehub, Sherry Turkle, Eric Weinstein, Ai Weiwei, Frank Wilczek, Ian Wilmut, Eva Wisten, Richard Saul Wurman, Anton Zeilinger. 





Franck Martin 
http://www.avonsys.com/ 
http://www.facebook.com/Avonsys 
twitter: FranckMartin Avonsys 

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