According to the University of California at San Diego’s appropriately named How Much Information project, we now consume about 100,000 words each day from various media. That’s a whopping 350 percent increase, measured in bytes, over what we crunched back in 1980.
Our smart tools also pull us together in new communities oriented around important issues. The notion of “collective intelligence” first surfaced in the early 20th century, when American entomologist William Morton Wheeler observed that a colony of ants could cooperatively act as a “superorganism.” The term has gone through many iterations, but now mostly refers to the cognitive surge that occurs when people and their computers are connected to one another. Instead of just thinking singly, we
cogitate as a hive.
As psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College says, “The experience that comes from thinking hard for a while about a subject is no longer available to some people, because they don’t stay on the task long enough to get to that point. Commitment has become a kind of dirty word.” The Internet’s capacity to generate superficial novelty is epitomized by the meme: a cultural tidbit, from a catchy anecdote to a joke to an image that spreads rapidly through society, now usually electronically.
One thought in the mimetic community is that ideas are parasites that don’t care what they do to their host as long as it helps them to spread,” Godin says. “The Tea Party -- or the Communist Party -- is a political meme that doesn’t care if it destroys the country, because its only job is to reproduce.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-14/aristotle-s-ideal-killed-by-web-part-3-commentary-by-winifred-gallagher.html
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