YouTube - Day of the Longtail :: I just saw this after Stephen mentioned it in OLDaily today. The message reminds me vaguely of the tagline for V for Vendetta - “People shouldn’t feel threatened by the media, the media should feel threatened by people.”
Two thoughts struck me as I was watching this. First, what happens when we start to see an educational long-tail effect? Can students used to infinite choice and variety, and expecting that they are able to communicate, interact and critique freely going to be satisfied by a course of studies that they have no voice in creating? Obviously I think not, but are schools ready for this kind of student? What happens when not just markets but curricula are conversations? (Wow - that’s an entire paragraph with only one declarative sentence in it.)
The second thought is that this is exactly the sort of thing that I mean when I call this blog (and all the blogs I connect to, and that they connect to, and … well, you get the point) a stigmergic web. We are in the midst of a sort of global networked consciousness, analagous to the way ants communicate by leaving scent trails for each other. The ants may never meet each other face to face, but they transfer information exactly like neurons transfer information to each other.
Neurons and bloggers actually have a lot in common, now that I think about it. Both are receiving information from other individuals in their network. Both can establish new connections - we do this whenever we read a new blog or find some other information source that we will return to. When neurons do this in our brains, we call it learning (at least for the changes that we are conscious of). What do we call it when a network of minds, capable of rewiring itself, extended throughout the world is established?
I used to read a lot of sci-fi as a kid and teen ager. One of the themes that was written about over and over and over was the possibility of humanity creating a computer, or later a network of computers, that became conscious. The mistake that the science fiction writers made was they assumed that the computers were the neurons in the global intellect. It seems clear that in fact the computers and the internet are the synapses - the spaces between neurons where signals are transferred from one neuron to the next. Each neuron “decides” (not really, but its a close enough approximation for now) whether it will process and pass along the signal or ignore it. The old sci-fi writers might be relieved to know that the neurons, reassuringly, are us. The web is one great big stigmergic communicaton system!
Stigmergic? Relax - you’re soaking in it! Or should that be “Relax - you’re soaking it in!”
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