Kevin Kelly thinks the web is not only what it really is — which is a huge peripheral memory and reference source, along with usage stats — but also a kind of independent thinking brain.
It’s not, even though it has connections, as does a neural net (which is likewise not a thinking brain).
KK is right that googling is replacing the consultation of our own onboard memories, but that is par for the course, ever since our species first began using external memories to increase our total information storage and processing capacity: Mimesis, language and writing were earlier, and more dramatic precursors. (We’re talking heads who already feel as helpless without our interlocutors, tapes and texts today as KK says we all will — and some already do today — without the web.)
And KK misses the fact that the brain is not, in fact, just a syntactic machine, the way the web is: There is no “semantic” web, just an increasingly rich “syntactic web“.
Nor (in my opinion) is the web’s most revolutionary potential in its role of periperal mega-memory and hyper-encyclopedia/almanac. It is not even — though it comes closer — in its interactive Hyde-park role in blogs and wikipedias. That’s just an extension of Call-In Chat Shows, Reality TV, acting-out, and everyone-wants-to-be-a-star. We’ve all had the capacity to talk for hundreds of thousands of years, but most of us have not found very much worth saying — or hearing by most others. The nature of the gaussian distribution is such that that is bound to remain a demographic rarity, even if the collective baseline rises — which I am not at all sure it’s doing! We just re-scale…
No, I think the real cognitive-killer-app of the web is the quote/commentary capability, but done openly — “skywriting”. At the vast bottom level this will just be the Hyde-Park “you know what’s wrong with the world dontcha?” pub-wisdom of the masses, gaussian noise. But in some more selective, rigorous and answerable reaches of cyberspace — corresponding roughly to what refereed, published science and scholarship used to be in the Gutenberg era — remarkable PostGutenberg efflorescences are waiting to happen: waiting only for the right demography to converge there, along with its writings, all Open Access, so the skywriting can begin in earnest.
Stevan Harnad