Engineering Politics
One Engineer’s view on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–and of course politics!

Worldwide Neural Network

It’s staggering to think of the ways the internet has changed the world.  Information sharing, information storage, and various speeds of communication (from slow to very fast).  Anyone in the world with a half-decent internet connection and a terminal (I’ll define as smart phone, netbook, laptop, PC) has the ability to connect to these vast resources and directly to other users.  With this capability, does the internet not act like a large world brain?  I know I’m not the only one to make this analogy, but with recent activity of twitter and facebook the “neural” activity has defintely quickened.  Messages (electrical signals?) are travelling around faster than ever but as Loring Wirbel points out in an interesting blog post, is the world brain losing some of it’s memory capability?  Not memory some would think of (there are servers storing more information than ever) but a different type of memory function.  Definitely an interesting idea.

3 Responses to “Worldwide Neural Network”

  1. If you can view the internet and it’s structure as a neural network, then what exactly do the constant blogging and “twittering” amount to? If the world is a brain, then all these “little voices” must indicate that the world is indeed CRAZY!

    Also, the fact that the word twittering isn’t underlined, i.e. spelled incorrectly, simply shows how social networking is taking over the world and indeed making it crazy.

    Did you hear that? I think Dana White just posted what he had for breakfast.

  2. Excellent analogy, James! The world is going crazy!

  3. Thanks for the mention! A former girlfriend mentioned (on Twitter, of course) that she was worried she was going crazy. I told her to think of it as an opportunity to deconstruct consciousness. I like to lay down on a sofa and “pixelslip” – break down the layers of vision one by one. Leads to very choppy lifestreams, that’s for durned sure.


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