How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

The net's impact on our minds and future

John Brockman (Ed.)

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857892478
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The Internet, in the memorable words of EDGE founder John Brockman, is 'the infinite oscillation of our collective consciousness interacting with itself. It's not about computers. It's not about what it means to be human - in fact, it challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score. It is about thinking'.

In How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think?, the latest volume in Brockman's cutting-edge Edge questions series, 154 of the world's leading intellectuals - scientists, artists and creative thinkers - explore exactly what it means to think in the new age of the Internet: from Nicholas Carr's reflections on what the Internet is doing to our brains, to Richard Dawkins's sanguine assessment of its long-term potential for good; and from Clay Shirky's assessment of the impact of the Internet on the dissemination and sharing of knowledge, to Ian and Joel Gold's observations on the seismic social changes it has brought about.

Editor John Brockman has assembled a world-class array of contributors, which includes (in addition to those mentioned above) Daniel C. Dennett, Martin Rees, Steven Pinker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sean Carroll, Brian Eno, Douglas Coupland, Matt Ridley, and scores of others at the epicentre of research in their respective disciplines.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE: THE EDGE QUESTION, BY JOHN BROCKMAN

INTRODUCTION: THE DAWN OF ENTANGLEMENT, BY W. DANIEL HILLIS

NICHOLAS CARR

The Bookless Library

CLAY SHIRKY

The Invisible College

RICHARD DAWKINS

Net Gain

FRANK WILCZEK

Let Us Calculate

KEVIN KELLY

The Waking Dream

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN

To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways

IAN GOLD AND JOEL GOLD

Tweet Me Nice

RICHARD FOREMAN

The Dazed State

MATTHEW RITCHIE

What’s Missing Here?

DANIEL C. DENNETT

Power Corrupts

CHRIS ANDERSON

The Rediscovery of Fire

JUNE COHEN

The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise

NOGA ARIKHA

The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility

LEO CHALUPA

The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television

PAUL KEDROSKY

The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays

ERIC DREXLER

The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There

DAVID DALRYMPLE

Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere

MARTIN REES

A Level Playing Field

SETH LLOYD

Move Aside, Sex

JOHN TOOBY

Rivaling Gutenberg

WILLIAM CALVIN

The Shoulders of Giants

MARK PAGEL

Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics

ROBERT SHAPIRO

Publications Can Perish

FRANK J. TIPLER

Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?

LEE SMOLIN

We Have Become Hunter-Gatherers of Images and Information

JON KLEINBERG

The Human Texture of Information

STEVEN PINKER

Not at All

TERRENCE SEJNOWSKI

This Is Your Brain on Internet

DONALD HOFFMAN

The Sculpting of Human Thought

ANDY CLARK

What Kind of a Dumb Question Is That?

THOMAS METZINGER

Public Dreaming

ANTON ZEILINGER

The Age of (Quantum) Information?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto)

NASSIM N. TALEB

The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge

SEAN CARROLL

Calling You on Your Crap

LERA BORODITSKY

How I Think About How...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: The Edge Question, by John Brockman
• Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement, by W. Daniel Hillis
• The Bookless Library
• The Invisible College
• Net Gain
• Let Us Calculate
• The Waking Dream
• To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways
• Tweet Me Nice
• The Dazed State
• What’s Missing Here?
• Power Corrupts
• The Rediscovery of Fire
• The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise
• The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility
• The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television
• The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays
• The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There
• Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere
• A Level Playing Field
• Move Aside, Sex
• Rivaling Gutenberg
• The Shoulders of Giants
• Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics
• Publications Can Perish
• Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?
• We Have Become Hunter-Gatherers of Images and Information
• The Human Texture of Information
• Not at All
• This Is Your Brain on Internet
• The Sculpting of Human Thought
• What Kind of a Dumb Question Is That?
• Public Dreaming
• The Age of (Quantum) Information?
• Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto)
• The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge
• Calling You on Your Crap
• How I Think About How I Think
• I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person—I Am a Poet
• Kayaks Versus Canoes
• The Upload Has Begun
• Hell if I Know
• What I Notice
• It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Can Find Out
• When I’m on the Net, I Start to Think
• The Internet Has Become Boring
• The Dumb Butler
• Finding Stuff Remains a Challenge
• Attention, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness
• Information Metabolism
• Ctrl + Click to Follow Link
• Replacing Experience with Facsimile
• Outsourcing the Mind
• A Prehistorian’s Perspective
• The Fourth Phase of Homo sapiens
• Transience Is Now Permanence
• A Return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna
• Take Love
• Internet Mating Strategies
• Internet Society
• Don’t Ring Me
• A Thousand Hours a Year
• Thinking Like the Internet, Thinking Like Biology
• The Internet Makes Me Think in the Present Tense
• Social Prosthetic Systems
• Evolving a Global Brain
• Search and Emergence
• My Fingers Have Become Part of My Brain
• A Mirror for the World’s Foibles
• a completely new form of sense
• By Changing My Behavior
• There Is No New Self
• I Once Was Lost but Now Am Found, or How to Navigate in the Chartroom of Memory
• The Greatest Pornographer
• My Sixth Sense
• The Internet Reifies a Logic Already There
• Instant Gratification
• The Internet as Social Amplifier
• Navigating Physical and Virtual Lives
• Not Everything or Everyone in the World Has a Home on the Internet
• Ephemera and Back Again
• What Do We Think About? Who Gets to Do the Thinking?
• The Internet Is a Cultural Form
• Wallowing in the World of Knowledge
• One’s Guild
• Trust Nothing, Debate Everything
• Harmful One-Liners, an Ocean of Facts, and Rewired Minds
• What Other People Think
• The Extinction of Experience
• The Collective Nature of Human Intelligence
• Six Ways the Internet May Save Civilization
• Better Neuroxing Through the Internet
• A Gift to Conspirators and Terrorists Everywhere
• The Ant Hill
• I Can Make a Difference Because of the Internet
• Go Virtual, Young Man
• My Internet Mind
• “If You Have Cancer, Don’t Go on the Internet”
• Incomprehensible Visitors from the Technological Future
• “Go Native”
• The Maximization of Neoteny
• Wisdom of the Crowd
• Weirdness of the Crowd
• The Synchronization of Minds
• My Judgment Enhancer
• Speed Plus Mobs
• Repetition, Availability, and Truth
• The Armed Truce
• More Efficient, but to What End?
• I Have Outsourced My Memory
• The New Balance: More Processing, Less Memorization
• The Enemy of Insight?
• The Joy of Just-Enoughness
• The Rise of Internet Prosthetic Brains and Soliton Personhood
• Immortality
• A Third Replicator
• Bells and Smoke
• Dare, Care, and Share
• Getting Close
• A Miracle and a Curse
• “The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data”
• Collective Action and the Global Commons
• Informed, Tightfisted, and Synthetic
• Massive Collaboration
• We Know Less About Thinking Than We Think
• An Impenetrable Machine
• A Question Without an Answer
• Conceptual Compasses for Deeper Generalists
• Art Making Going Rural
• The Cat Is Out of the Bag
• Everyone Is an Expert
• Pioneering Insights
• Thinking in the Amazon
• The Virtualization of the Universe
• Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder
• Present Versus Future Self
• I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be
• My Perception of Time
• The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock
• I Must Confess to Being Perplexed
• Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic
• Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much
• internet is wind
• Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space
• The Power of Conversation
• A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule
• Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale
• A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind
• Sandbars and Portages
• No One Is Immune to the Storms That Shake the World
• Dowsing Through Data
• Bleat for Yourself