A Big Question: ‘How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?’
As each new year approaches, John Brockman, founder of Edge, an online publication, consults with three of the original members of Edge—Stewart Brand, founder and editor of Whole Earth Catalog; Kevin Kelly, who helped to launch Wired in 1993 and wrote “What Technology Wants,” a book to be published in October (Viking Penguin); and George Dyson, a science historian who is the author of several books including “Darwin Among the Machines.” Together they create the Edge Annual Question—which Brockman then sends out to the Edge list to invite responses.
The Conversation
The 2010 question elicited, in all, 172 essays that comprised a 132,000-word manuscript published online by Edge in January.
Kellyspeaks about a new type of mind, amplified by the Internet, evolving, and able to start a new phase of evolution outside of the body. In “Net Gain,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins looks 40 years into the future when “retrieval from the communal exosomatic memory will become dramatically faster, and we shall rely less on the memory in our skulls.” Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” writes about “The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge” as he asks us to “consider the explosive situation: More information (particularly thanks to the Internet) causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge while degrading predictability.”
Nick Bilton, lead writer of The New York Times’s Bits blog, notes that “[the] Internet is not changing how we think. Instead, we are changing how the Internet thinks.” Actor Alan Alda worries about “[speed] plus mobs. A scary combination.” He wonders, “Is there an algorithm perking somewhere in someone’s head right now that can act as a check against this growing hastiness and mobbiness?” New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan writes that “we must keep on reading and not mistake new texts for new worlds, or new forms for new brains.”
Numerous artists responded in enlightening ways, as their evocative headlines suggest:
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Marina Abromavic: “My Perception of Time”
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Stefano Boeri: “Internet Is Wind”
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Tony Conrad: “A Question With(out) an Answer”
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James Croak: “Art Making Going Rural”
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Olafur Eliasson: “The Internet as Reality Producer”
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Eric Fischl and April Gornik: “Replacing Experience With Facsimile”
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Terence Koh: “A Completely New Form of Sense”
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Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Edge A to Z (Pars Pro Toto)”
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Jonas Mekas: “I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person—I Am a Poet”
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Matthew Ritchie: “The Interface I Want Is the Real World.”