[LINK] Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Antony Barry
> Sent: Sunday, 20 February 2011 7:37 PM
> To: Link list
> Subject: [LINK] Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
> 
> 
> This may be of interest.
> 
> 
> 
> Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
> 
> Author : John Brockman
> Publisher : Harper Perennial
> ISBN : 0062020447
> 
> Published from Book Crawler


The Question was last years EDGE question of the Year.

With 168 essays written on the Topic by the following thinkers:


    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, Lisa Randall, Raqs Media Collective, 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.



Quote/ [From: http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html#responses]

The Edge Annual Question — 2010

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

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?

/QUOTE