Grazers like cattle consume grass in bulk during intensive feeding bouts. Technology visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and James Licklider sought to develop machines that could do our remembering for us. But the Internet-as-social-amplifier can instead work for good, by connecting those coping with challenges. If a report on one site sounds implausible (or too plausible to be true) you can quickly check it on several more. When we receive one of those panicky warnings (often attributed to Microsoft or Symantec) about a dangerous computer virus, we do not spam it to our entire address book but instead Google a key phrase from the warning itself. By now it seems obvious that the only feasible way to rank the Internet's offerings is to track the online behaviors of individual users. We can finally harness the Law of Large Numbers to improve our decision-making: the larger the sample of peer ratings, the more accurate the average. Cursed with meticulous memory, Funes escapes to live in remoteness and isolation — a "dark room" — where new images do not enter and where his motionless figure is absorbed in the contemplation of a sprig of Artemisia. As I write this, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers located at far-flung corners of the world have been meeting online in a workshop devoted to solving what is arguably the fundamental problem in science — the mystery of human consciousness. What I've learned from the Internet comes not from Web 2.0 or anything else.0, it's the original insights from the pioneers that made its spectacular growth possible. I've never had much time for the academic obsession with intelligence. The great physicist Richard Feynman often claimed: "there will be no more great physicists." In his "On Exactitude in Science", Borges carries on with similar ideas concerning trace as he describes an empire in which the craft of cartography attained such precision that its map has emerged as large as the kingdom it depicts. More often than I'd like to admit, I sit down to do something and then get up bleary-eyed hours later, only to realize my task remains undone (or I can't even remember the starting point). I notice that I read books more cursorily — scanning them in the same way that I scan the Net — 'bookmarking' them. What is academic work in general, at least in the humanities? What will it do to us? Thus, if the present self doesn't feel a connection with the future self, then why forego present gratification for someone else's future kicks? It is not a matter of whether this leads to a loss of privacy or an erosion of spaces for intimacy, it is just that issues such as privacy, intimacy, publicity, inclusion and seclusion are now inflected very differently. While this does not mean that as artists, intellectuals or creative practitioners we stop considering or attending to our anchorage in specific co-ordinates of actual physical locations, what it does mean is that we understand that the concrete fact of our physical place in the world is striated by the location's transmitting and receiving capacities, which turns everything we choose to create into either a weak or a strong signal. Were messages to pop up on my screen every second, I would not be able to think straight. What I find particularly worrisome with regards to the "what" question is the rapid and inexorable disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence from our digital lives. It must have been exhilarating, but much of it was to utterly no purpose. Not only have I been transformed into an Internet pessimist, but recently the Net has begun to feel downright spooky. The number of your Facebook friends, like the make of the car you drive, confers a certain status. Does she love me? It's as if the relentless demand of networks for me to be everywhere, all the time, denies me access to the moment in which I am really living. This is useful now, but I expect it to become much more useful as I get older and my memory starts to become less reliable — moving more of the information that passes through my mind into that penumbral region. Why didn't I remember this exchange? I tried to explain that it was a way of connecting, and was not what he thought. When I first used an Internet search engine in the early 1990s, I imagined myself dipping into a vast, universal library, a museum vault filled with accumulated knowledge. This leads us, interestingly enough, to the importance of astrophysics in explaining the relevance of obscurity for contemporaneity. How is the Internet changing the way I think? Some people would say that the old way was good thing, I disagree. Life, too, has gone through periods of editorial collapse. These reflect successively higher levels of expertise among the raters — movie renters on Netflix, film enthusiasts on IMDB, and film critics on Metacritic. The preprint archives where scientific work (like my wrong paper) are posted for all to read are great levelers: a second- or third-world scientist with a modem can access the unedited state of the art in a scientific field as it is produced, rather than months or years later. '; 'How would I keep in touch with my friends abroad? A hybrid social group that includes near-strangers and true strangers may also open to the door to real danger. Once I longed to create an interface that would simulate my interaction with the real world. In Funes' world perception makes no sense at all as there is simply no time or motive to perceive, reflect, or interpret. So vivid is Funes' memory that he can effortlessly distinguish any physical object at every distinct time of viewing. The shared mind that is the Internet is a comfort to me. Now, it can happen in an instant. But I can tell you that it has already affected the content, form and the working procedures of everything that I do. Nevertheless, I am much less concerned about "tweeners" like me who grew up before the Internet than I am with children of the Internet age, so-called "Digital Natives." I found myself drawn to write a book about Silicon Valley. By this, I don't mean the fact that 147 million people have watched Charlie Bit Me, with another 20 million watching the various remixes. The miracle of the browser is that it can show you any image or text from that storehouse. For example, musicians used to tour to promote their records, but, since records stopped making much money due to illegal downloads, they now make records to promote their tours. Freedom of thought and speech — where they exist — were unforeseen offspring of the printing press, and they change how we think. However, this same standard quantum mechanics does not give an exact description of the rate at which the final distribution will be approached. By contrast, according to a 2009 Pew study, 51% of Internet users now post content online that they have created themselves, and 1 in 10 Americans post something online for others to see every day. The mass media of the 20th century was truly novel because the analog based technology turned folks from home entertainers and creators (gathering around the piano and singing and inventing songs and the like) to passive consumers of a few major outlets (sitting around the telly and fighting over the remote). Who does the thinking has changed too. We made machines that became shared extensions of mind. Back then, of course, the Internet didn't exist, but the idea was alive. So much so that governments and other organisations often restrict their most secure communications to older technologies, even sending scrolled messages in small capsules through pneumatic pipes. I don't believe there's such a thing as too much information. So I am now on an Internet diet, in order to understand the world a bit better — and make another bet on horrendous mistakes by economic policy makers. To be contemporary means to perpetually come back to a present where we have never yet been. I imagined that in the distant future, other workers might pull the appropriate volume off a library shelf and find my work to be some help. I rarely connect to the Internet from the Amazon these days. There are no new others. We place demands on the Internet, but the Internet hasn't placed any fundamentally new demands on us. You should then be able to purchase a match pass. Now, we start learning that it is all about flows. As we now know, the emergence of photography actually helped free artists from the need to describe the world realistically, and this helped revivify painting and jumpstart modernism. Regarding memory: Once I look up something on the Internet, I don't need to retain all the details for future use — I know where to find that information again, and can quickly and easily do so. The chemists were, to use Richard Foreman's phrase, "pancake people". Each use of a memory changes the memory. The sadistic boss can blight an existence however full of affection from others, and the sustaining spouse can morph into That Cheating Bastard. Printing summoned into existence increasingly diversified bodies of new knowledge, multiplied productive divisions of labor, midwifed new professions, and greatly expanded the middle class. Infants cannot control their visual attention; their gaze seems to wander aimlessly from one object to another, because this part of their Ego is not yet consolidated. My city no longer has a truly major newspaper, and the edgy, free City Paper is a pale shadow of its former self in danger of extinction. But things are a lot worse. So, when I hear every day of children being snatched my brain gives me the wrong answer to the question of risk: it has divided a big number (the children snatched all over the world) by a small number (the tribe). A second is scalability. Being lazy, I am prone to cannibalizing my work: something said in a lecture will get plowed into an op-ed; the op-ed will later be absorbed into a book; snippets from the book may get spoken in another lecture. He introduced me to John Perry Barlow who had just started a foundation called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But the Internet certainly constrains what I think about. This gradually dawned on me during the 1990s, driven home with particular force by the Kevin Mitnick affair. So, let's acknowledge that the Internet allows us to think and write in a much more natural way than the one imposed by the written culture tradition: the dialogical dimension of our thinking is now enhanced by continuous, liquid exchanges with others. With the Internet, we are returning to this practice of shared community. Moreover, in the ever-present gossip circles, a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor's hunting skills, even whether he was amusing, kind or smart. It's what happens when everyone is there. Initially, they appear empowering. An MS doctor was speaking at a symposium and a Cancer researcher heard his results. Conversely, no matter how important a statement may have appeared when it was first uttered, its significance is compromised by the fact that it is ultimately filed away as just another datum, a pebble, in a growing mountain range. But, here again, the anthill does the work for free. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. Important caveats and unpredicted side-effects notwithstanding, Engelbart's forecasts have come to pass in ways that surprised him. The anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, calculated that the volume of the human cortex predicts a social group of 150 — about the size of the villages that would have constituted our social environment for a great deal of evolutionary time, and which can still be found in "primitive" societies. The ethereal beauty also contains lethal ether to the less fortunate non-digerati, such as the children or the elderly. And it  allows new styles of research. Now anyone can assess their impact factor through a multitude of platforms including Facebook, Twitter and of course, blogging. Sitting on her psychiatrist's couch, desperately alone, she talked; and while she talked, she Twittered. However, the truth is that the virtual world grows out of, and ultimately depends on, the one world whose inputs it draws on, whose resources it consumes, and whose flaws it inevitably inherits. Abstaining from the Internet is not a feasible experiment even on a personal level! The Internet has not changed the way I think. I'm particularly struck by the ease of using videos, allowing me to feel as though I've witnessed a particular event in the news. This hunger for the present is deeply embedded in the very architecture and business models of social networking sites. They probably always were. I notice that the desire for community is sufficiently strong for millions of people to belong to entirely fictional communities such as Second Life andWorld of Warcraft. Everyone would think the same way. Austin already has an established tech ecosystem of its own that stretches back decades, with IBM, Samsung, and Dell Technologies cementing the city as a tech hub. But the finding that parental behavior can alter gene expression and thought life in a child certainly leaves open the possibility that other behavioral environments, including the Internet, can do the same. Funes is not able to generalize, to deduce or to induce anything he experiences. The original quote from the Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger was exactly the opposite, "The plural of anecdotes is data." This is impossible to tell. And, to my mind at least, this is a grave problem. A scientist trained in the print media tradition is aware that there is knowledge stored in the print journals, but I wonder if the new generation of scientists, who grow up with the Internet, are aware of this. A few years back, Nature commissioned a study that showed that when it came to accuracy about hard-core science facts, Wikipedia was within hailing distance of the Encyclopedia Britannica. We might consider this state perfect for science but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. In England around 1200 the ability to read a particular Psalm entitled a defendant to be tried in an ecclesiastical court, which was typically more lenient than a civil court. Although all animals communicate, their channels are typically narrow and do not support expression of any and all thoughts. Beyond these, many of us are also interacting with genuine strangers in chat rooms, virtual spaces, and second lives. (Carsten Höller), E is for Evolutive exhibitions In other cases, too, such as severe drunkenness or senile dementia, you may lose the ability to direct your attention — and, correspondingly, feel that your "self" is falling apart. In 1962 John Tukey first proposed data analysis as a field in its own right and split the field of statistics in two. The bottomless reservoirs of the present have blinded us to the positive and therapeutic aspects of the past. Often it is an amateur, outside journalism or academia, who just happens to have a piece of knowledge to hand. The Internet allows us to know fewer facts, being sure that they are always literally at our fingertips, thus reducing their importance as a component of the thought process. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened. But the Internet has a more powerful protection system than I'd realized. Recent evidence, however, suggests that unconscious processes may actually be better at solving complex problems. There's a conversation going on over Skype. In the Sistine Chapel, God and Adam were connecting on Michelangelo's ceiling, outside fingers were twitching on laptops and cellphones for one of the Internet's seminal news moments. We are still the same warlike, peace loving, curious, gregarious, proud, romantic, opportunistic — and naïve — creatures we were before the Internet, indeed before the automobile, the radio, the Civil War, or the ancient Sumerians. As the first generation to contemplate the fact that humanity may have a severely truncated future, we live at arguably the most pivotal moment in the substantial history of Homo sapiens. Most grass is not especially nutritious and is regurgitated later as the animals sit reflectively and chew the cud. The ideas are unfortunately motivated to a significant degree by a denial of the biological nature of personhood. It's that last .56% that gets you. I notice that I now digest my knowledge as a patchwork drawn from a wider range of sources than I used to. Debate on this issue can be clarified by specifying the framework of evaluation. But in what sense is the cloud to be seen as a single individual rather than a society? It doesn't of course mean that it was accurate. The increased use of the computer in scientific research, from simple data analysis to simulations, means the ability to recreate and verify facts for oneself is very real, as scientists can release the complete software environment and data required to reproduce their results on the Internet. A survey in 378AD identified 29 libraries in Rome, but as the Empire declined the habit of establishing and maintaining libraries was lost. Yet the computer helps me and corrects my spelling without asking anyone. His summary: "It was about some Russians.". Now, when I expend the effort to squirrel memories away, I store them in the clutter of my hard drive as much as I do in the labyrinth of my brain. Instead of theatrically changing our thinking, this time, we must keep our heads, which means — to me — that we must keep on reading and not mistake new texts for new worlds, or new forms for new brains. It's social. i am very interested in the Internet, especially right now. Within the endogenous limits of learning set by one's genetic inheritance, exposure to the Internet can alter how one thinks no less than can exposure to language, literature or mathematics. Oft-discussed examples range from third world education to terrorist technology. The Internet has become the engine of gift economy and cooperation. $5 for Canada $7 for Worldwide Shipping costs are flat rate Cryo Chamber is a record label with a collaborative focus run by Simon Heath (Atrium Carceri) focusing on high quality dark ambient with a cinematic edge. In science we generally first learn about invisible structures from anomalies in concrete systems. It breeds trifles. I love not having to be in an office to check books. But has the resulting information overload also deeply changed how we think? Because their circumstances require that they sever all ties with their previous ways of life, they develop a brand new dynamic amongst themselves, and as a result, this sparks off the fundamental emotions of humankind — love, desire, passion and hatred. And a fourth is open standards. I think aloud and online more, because the call and response is a comfort to me. As an arrangement of interlocking high, pop and folk art forms, the Internet is no different. "Identity is shifty, identity is a choice". The Internet seemed to have given me a case of Attention Deficit Disorder, but did it really change the way I think, or just made it more difficult have the time to think? Books, newspapers, magazines, films and recordings offered a democratic way for consumers to pony up a tiny chunk of money that helped the author or enterprise survive and sometimes even prosper. The thought pattern of different people, on different subjects, requires varying mixtures of knowing facts, being able to correlate them, creating new ideas, distinguishing between important and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense dominate, analyzing processes and numerous other components of a complex mental exercise. Jerry Coyne and I just met for the first time in a taxi in Mexico. The real work, of course, goes on elsewhere but we want the Internet to brings us the results. The current mainstream, dominant culture of the Internet is the descendant of what used to be the radical culture of the early Internet. As I stare out my window, at the unusually beautiful Seattle weather, I realize, I haven't been out to walk yet today — sweet Internet juices still dripping down my chin. New applications can be created without requiring anyone's approval, and can be implemented where information is created and consumed rather than centrally controlled. and because this affects everybody, i feel that thinking about what the Internet is now must always come back to myself as an individual. Because the Internet is my new pencil and paper, I am "smarter" in factuality. Today, many psychologists divide the mind into two (as Plato observed, you need at least two parts to account for mental conflict, as in that between reason and emotion). I want to be clear that I am not complaining about technical ignorance. Moreover, just when we need them most, the meticulously trained editors of our newspapers, journals, and publishing houses are being laid off in droves. Growing up in the land of theme parks, I became aware at an early age that the unreal is the realist thing there is. I've argued that such relationships can become so close that other people essentially act as extensions of oneself, much like a wooden leg can serve as an extension of oneself. I believe that the Internet, used this way, will play a revolutionary role in promoting our understanding of the fundamental problems at the frontiers of science. '; 'Impossible to access information'; 'You mean I have to physically go shopping/visit the library? But with this gain in the accessibility of the literature of science has come an increase in its vulnerability. But it nonetheless changes the social situation of that mind. Some travelers may have recently gotten a glimpse of the truth, for example, upon learning that their flights were grounded due to an Internet router failure in Salt Lake City, but for most this was just another inscrutable annoyance. Wikipedia, and now Twitter, as generic technical platforms have allowed participants to modify and optimize the virtual workspace to evolve new norms through cultural negotiation. For the visual artist, seeing is essential to thought. Before Gutenberg, books were scarce and expensive, requiring months or years of skilled individual effort to produce a single copy. It was chairman Mao who brought in this drastic change, among others. In all these cases, censorship hobbled the society and fomented revolutions. I was twenty-five years old. I would like to focus on applications that go beyond human-to-human communication. Mathematics has been developing responses to the ubiquity of error for hundreds of years, resulting in formal logic and the mathematical proof. He and his successors at IPTO, including Robert Taylor and Larry Roberts, provided the ideas that led to the development of the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, which itself emerged as an ARPA-funded research project in the mid-1980s. As is evident to anyone who has stood in a forest or on a seashore, there is a stark difference between a photograph or video and the real thing. In some cases subscriptions were used to purchase books, but there was no charge for subsequent loans. It usually turns out to be, say, “Hoax Number 76”, its history and geography meticulously tracked. And that may have worked had technological development leaned towards the option of living life disconnected from those machines whenever access to their memory banks was not required. At no point have we had central bankers missing elementary risk metrics, like debt levels, that even the Babylonians understood well. Lucid dreams are something I have always been interested in, and have written about extensively. After experiencing this "hearing loop" technology in countless British venues, from cathedrals to post office windows and taxi back seats, I helped introduce it to West Michigan, where it can now be found in several hundred venues, including Grand Rapids' convention center and all gate areas of its airport. That was The Matrix wasn't it? Our primate ancestors did it all the time, and do it today: they groom. More generally, it seems like the scope of my research has become both broader and deeper, because both cost less. It is moderated rather then refereed; and the refereed journals now play no role in spreading information. This is how physicists go hunting. The fact is that the Internet provides a wealth of information. The Internet hasn't changed the way I think; it hasn't altered one whit the way in which I — that is, my brain—processes information…other than maybe by forcing me to figure out how to process a lot more of it. An archive search that in the past might have taken a week, plus thousands of miles of travel, can now be done at blitz speeds in the privacy of your own home or office. Pubmed tells me that in 2009 there were 280 articles on cancer published per day. The degree to which our online and offline personas differ will of course vary from one person to another. We are learning to multitask, our attention span is becoming shorter, and many of our social relationships are taking on a strangely disembodied character. Search engines are linear, predictable and essentially an uninteresting way to use the Internet. Reality is a man-made process. Reconsolidation is essentially an updating process. The information river rushes by. There was anyway a family history of hernias. On page one I had printed, very legibly, the following preface: "To Posterity: This volume contains the authentic record of ingenious and original chemical research conducted by Robert Shapiro, currently a graduate student of organic chemistry at Harvard University.". — to check my e-mails on the i-phone or blackberry every five minutes, because the important message could be arriving at any moment. Waiting for me. On the one hand, there is the danger of homogenizing forces, which is also at stake in the world of the arts. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? Moreover, studies show that individuals within your social network have a profound influence on your personal health and happiness, for example, through your contacts on the Internet (whom you usually know) and their friends (whom you may not know). The Internet is already an enormous repository of the products of many minds, and the interactive aspects of the evolving Internet are bringing it ever closer to the sort of personal interactions that underlie Social Prosthetic Systems. The Internet made me think more BOTH AND instead of EITHER OR instead of NOR NOR. There is plenty out there. But for me, the most revolutionary change is in my judgment and decision-making — the ways I evaluate and choose among good or bad options. Depth, breadth and richness of knowledge are what make it work in my passions and my profession. They like to be used. Important issues fade from focus fast, and while many of humanity's challenges get more complicated, society's ability to pay attention to complex arguments dwindles.