Julian Dibbell has a wonderful piece in Wired that puts some perspective on the Twitter phenomena. What really caught my eye was a quote from an NYU journalism professor, Jay Rosen, who calls Twitter, "mindcasting" (last para).
Today's muse, so what is the nature of thought? Does the speed up of thought exchange create "higher level" thoughts (whatever that means)? What is the connection between thoughts and consciousness? Is there a thought network, independent from the biological network? After all, thoughts are a product of a very sophisticated biological network of our brains, and we as a species, whether consciously or not, appear to be embarked on the beginnings of replicating this network model in non-biological form, at least for now. The level of network sophistication appears to be increasing exponentially. Just look at the O3b Networks project, which I just heard about this morning, from of all things, a TiVo stock message board.
If is difficult to overstate just how fast we are networking ourselves, and how little we really "know" about what we are doing and what we are creating. What appears to be clear, is that networking at this level, has really no precedent in human history, we as a species appear to be embarked on a grand experiment that appears to be powered by a force greater than ourselves. Maybe it is not an experiment, maybe it is a well worn evolutionary path taking the human species to a new level of development, but new only to the species, not to universal evolution.
Today's muse, so what is the nature of thought? Does the speed up of thought exchange create "higher level" thoughts (whatever that means)? What is the connection between thoughts and consciousness? Is there a thought network, independent from the biological network? After all, thoughts are a product of a very sophisticated biological network of our brains, and we as a species, whether consciously or not, appear to be embarked on the beginnings of replicating this network model in non-biological form, at least for now. The level of network sophistication appears to be increasing exponentially. Just look at the O3b Networks project, which I just heard about this morning, from of all things, a TiVo stock message board.
If is difficult to overstate just how fast we are networking ourselves, and how little we really "know" about what we are doing and what we are creating. What appears to be clear, is that networking at this level, has really no precedent in human history, we as a species appear to be embarked on a grand experiment that appears to be powered by a force greater than ourselves. Maybe it is not an experiment, maybe it is a well worn evolutionary path taking the human species to a new level of development, but new only to the species, not to universal evolution.
