Who are you, really? How many ideas are your own? What have you put together for yourself, and what was given to you? Maybe it would be better to ask another question: where are you? Does that seem easier? Its not.
To see what I mean, lets look at another animal: a rabbit. Rabbits are born with instincts to mate, flee, eat, burrow, and many others- these are mostly unmodifiable. Everything else that the rabbit needs to become, every other bit of information it will ever learn, it must learn on its own. What time is safe to eat from the vegetable garden? Can a rabbit outrun a dog? Where is the softest earth for a burrow? There are no shortcuts. Very few animals can even learn by observation, i.e, learning to solve a problem by watching another animal solve that problem. But unlike the rabbit, we have thousands of years of written and spoken history to draw on when we need to learn something new. So where does this leave you?
Yes, we are born with instincts- walking, breathing, eating, drinking, recognizing faces to name a few. But if were to ask you to imagine the qualities that make up your identity- what ideas and concepts are at the core of your being- almost nobody would list these as being important. We see ourselves as mental creatures- not physical ones. Your identity is made of memories, thoughts, and ideas. Except for language, our genetic birthright is no more impressive than any ape or mammal. It is only through millenia of trial and error, wars and conflicts, enlightenment and dark ages that we are given the tools and ability to achieve far more than any other species ever has. Put any modern infant in the stone age and rest assured they wont have any intellectual advantage over its native inhabitants.
Language is just one of many tools used in the nature that accomplishes the same purpose: information transfer. Other options include pheromones, bird calls, vibrations, beauty, or body movements. Spoken language in particular is unique and spectacular in that it can precisely recreate the informational content of one mind in another. By merely hearing a series of noises, I can understand almost exactly what the speaker was trying to say. Of course, there is always miscommunication, but for the longest time it was the best way to move complex information around a group of individuals. Language gave us ideas.
Then humans invented writing. Writing may seem to be no different than speaking; after all, words are words. But writing gave us something else, something spectacular: precision. No longer need we only remember the ideas we heard, now we could refer to the contents of someone else's language exactly, no matter how much time had passed or how much distance it had travelled traveled. The written word is protected from the ravages of time and the fallibility of human memory. Before writing, we had only stories. Now we had history. Now we had a real memory.
Of course, the story does not stop there. With the internet, mass media, and social media we completed the next major step in our social evolution. We now have connection. Distance means nothing to an email or blog post. Our capacity for connection is now based only on our ability to discern relevant data and to broadcast our own information to relevant receivers. We share and distribute information in networks spanning the entire earth. These networks are self optimizing and efficient, with a structure that is so complex and intricate it has only one other parallel in nature: the brain.
While comparing human society to a biological brain might seem like an either an extended metaphor or a forced contrivance, there are simply too many parallels and potential benefits to ignore the comparison. Only in the last ten years, many peoples lives are reaching levels of connectivity never before experienced by species on earth. Even great colonies of ants and bees humming together can only send and recieve simple directions and actions to one another. With email, printed words, and social media we have crossed the gulfs of time and space and rendered the possibility of global inter-human networks well within the reach of anyone in a first world country. Human interaction has never been so fast, precise, and flexible.
Obviously, we are not literally a giant brain, nor are we some kind of superorganism. Humans are discrete animals (unlike neurons) and driven by individual motivations (unlike ants or bees). But if we were to step back and look at the big picture, what if something else is happening? What if it is more than a metaphor? What if human life is rapidly becoming some other kind of a distributed computational network- something that solves problems in fundamentally different ways than anything else on the planet? Does it feel any different? Do we need to change the way we interact? How much should we rely on technology to mediate our lives? Is our culture fundamentally different than that of our ancestors? How do ideas travel through society, and whats our role in the process? How did we get here?
A fair amount has been written about the āglobal brainā or the āsocial organismā, and almost all of it is either too abstract, too far removed from everyday life, or simply wishful thinking. My aim in this book is to describe and support what it means to be part of an globally interconnected society, where it came from, how ideas spread in it, and how we can help to shape it.
Starting from the beginning, we have a lot of ground to cover. From the origins of society to the structure of the brain to what it means to share a post on facebook or watch an ad on TV. So before we begin, ask yourself this question again:
When all your memories are saved in photos, when all your thoughts are remixes of things youve read or heard, when all of your ideas are spread around the world in a thousand different computers, where does that that leave YOU?
If I have seen any farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
-Iassic Newton
