Mind-web symbiosis, a tantalising prospect. For one thing, a mind's memory is now being under-written:
I'm slowly trying to teach myself the methodology that Doctorow has modeled for several years now: If you want to be able to find something in the future, don't bury it in your files -- blog about it, put it out on the Net, where Google will never lose it, and if for some reason you can't find it, someone else will probably have picked it up and saved it for you. Scott Rosenberg
And with this come changing social habits: the web and individual machines that we use (mine, friends', our work place's, cafés' …) flowing into one — my hard drives, my memory sticks, my camphone … all now integrated with web-based applications. Prompted by Jeremy Zawodny, I turned up Paul Graham's 2001 essay, 'The Other Road Ahead':
When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we'll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with … When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what's happening inside it. …
There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications … For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software. … you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones. … if you look at the kind of things most people use computers for, a tenth of a second latency would not be a problem. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, and there are a lot of people like her. …
The whole idea of "your computer" is going away, and being replaced with "your data." You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather, any client, and a client doesn't have to be a computer.
Jeremy's comment: 'The more I find myself using increasingly larger and cheaper USB memory sticks, my colocated server, and on-line services like Flickr, I realize how my desktop and laptop computers are becoming less and less important in the grand scheme of things. And when I think about how popular web-based mail systems (Y! Mail, Hotmail, GMail) are, it's apparent that a lot of folks are keeping their data elsewhere.'
It's already happened for many of us, but let's not forget how few in number "we" still are: my teaching colleagues were amazed last week that I have on my hard drive files of data stretching back many years and I've long since grown used to their amazement that I keep e-mail. The gap between rich and poor nations preoccupies us, and quite rightly so, but the divisions within our own societies between the "digitally active" and the rest is so big it's often difficult to remember that it's there at all. To many of our co-workers and colleagues, computers are merely clever calculators, typewriters and terminals for Googling and grabbing an article.
We have a long way to go before we will have realised that vision of collaborative interaction, of many mind-webs working together across physical and temporal distances, that John Udell wrote about last December:
The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. … The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial.
We need to do much more in schools to introduce students to the implications of the revolution that is the web. A point of entry that appeals to students is memory and it would be interesting to devise a sixth form course (in the UK, this means 17–18 year-olds) which takes in ancient memory practices, looks at tips and tricks, at Dominic O'Brien's Learn to Remember (etc) and also embraces digital and other, web-based developments that greatly enhance our ability to record and access individual and communal memory. At the far reaches of this canvas might be the (surely highly speculative, if undoubtedly ambitious!) project being undertaken by Artificial Development — an attempt to create an artificial neural network cognitive system (as reported by Roland Piquepaille last July). Once engaged, students might be led to discuss work such as that of Tom Daniel who 'integrates concepts in zoology, engineering, and mathematics'. This might then lead us back to the idea of the web as analogous to a neural system in which we are each a node and to a wider discussion of the biological metaphors underlying some of the ways we are coming to understand what we are creating in this thing we call the web and, in turn, what this tells us about ourselves … I can envisage such a course — at once rich, allusive and tightly integrated with traditional knowledge and cutting-edge technology.
And when we tackle memory in this course, we must not forget forgetfulness! Anne Galloway wrote about this back in 2003, and linked there to Fabio Sergio (also writing in 2003):
All in all we are facing a future strung tight between the ideal, pacific world of the Memex, where man will be given "access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages", and one where Lenny Nero will feel at home, characterized by our collective inability to let go of our past. I keep hoping (and working) for the first scenario to become our future, but recognize it will require active involvement from everyone, driven by ample awareness of what's at stake.
