The Edge.org question for 2010 is How is the Internet Changing the Way We Think? The site has lots of interesting answers including quite a bit doom and gloom about how we’re distracting ourselves to death, penned by smart people like Clay Shirky, Danny Hillis, and Dan Dennett.  But I was particularly intrigued by a couple passages from the response of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Like many of the other respondents, Dawkins has observed a dumbing down of the individual as a result of the lower quality of media we’re exposed to, and the information firehouse that seems to be preventing us from focusing too hard or too long on anything that requires deep thought.  But at the same time, Dawkins (and other respondents) see room for optimism. As Dawkins put it:

But I want to leave negativity and nay saying and end with some speculative — perhaps more positive — observations. The unplanned worldwide unification that the Web is achieving (a science-fiction enthusiast might discern the embryonic stirrings of a new life form) mirrors the evolution of the nervous system in multicellular animals. …

I am reminded of an insight that comes from Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novel, The Black Cloud. The cloud is a superhuman interstellar traveller, whose ‘nervous system’ consists of units that communicate with each other by radio — orders of magnitude faster than our puttering nerve impulses.

But in what sense is the cloud to be seen as a single individual rather than a society? The answer is that interconnectedness that is sufficiently fast blurs the distinction. A human society would effectively become one individual if we could read each other’s thoughts through direct, high speed, brain-to-brain radio transmission. Something like that may eventually meld the various units that constitute the Internet.

I agree with Dawkins and many of the other experts who give their opinion to the Edge.org question. The jury is still out on just how the Internet is impacting the thinking of individuals. It gives us the opportunity to be aware of so much more than has ever been possible. But whether this will translate into knowledge individuals can employ to lead better lives isn’t yet certain.

What is indisputable is that the Internet is affording opportunities for collective intelligence, and coordinated action on a scale that has  never before been possible.  But is less certain is whether we will find ways to effectively nurture and harness this collective energy.  That seems to be what Web 2.0 is all about.  At the moment, we appear to be going through the equivalent of a Cambrian Explosion of projects & startups trying to capitalize on web-enabled collaborative systems. There are literally hundreds of big and small apps trying to leverage Twitter alone.

As Jeff Stibel (@Stibel) suggests in his new book Wired for Thought (which I highly recommend), we are likely to soon see a period of mass extinction of social media startups as the novelty of this new form of collaboration and communication wears off.  Such a die off will resemble  the massive pruning of connections that occurs in the human brain to eliminate redundant and unhelpful connections during childhood.  The human brain’s synaptic down selection during maturation is astonishing and quite draconian, going from about 10 quadrillion connections in a three year-old to a mere 100 trillion by adulthood, which means than only 1 in 100 synapses survive (source: Edelman’s book Neural Darwinism).

Hopefully the fittest & most useful (as opposed to the most amusing) will survive, and the result will be a set of sites and services that will facilitate true collective intelligence and collaborative action to move humanity forward, pulling we overstimulated and distracted individuals along with it.

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