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December 27, 2006

Time discovers the Internet again

Time Magazine made all of us "Person of the Year," and I've been thinking I should blog some articulate comment or other. Frankly, I'm just relieved. When Time last focused on the 'net, it was all about Cyberporn. At least this latest issue explores worthy and productive aspects of our New Life Online. Ethan Zuckerman writes a longer assessment of the Time piece and its various aftershocks, and he includes a d'oh quote that I kinda like (and missed, because I didn't wade through Time's article): Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. The older I get, the less I see wisdom, especially in crowds, and especially in media, either broadcast or interactive. But that's okay, we can't be smart about everything.

Seriously, so much of this stuff is buzz, and its like meringue - it's evaporating even as it sets. Time Magazine knows something's happening, but it doesn't know what it is. You can't really think it, anymore than you can approach surfing (either kind) as an intellectual exercise.

The Internet is popping up everywhere and more and more people are connecting. I think that's a god thing. I live and breathe Internet and media and live by those connections, even though I don't believe much of anything these days. What I think about these days is how to make those connections work, and how the connections might work to preserve the things connecting, all those eager minds. Perhaps a noösphere is forming.

One of the original aspects of the noosphere concept deals with evolution. Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is 'creative' and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L'évolution créatrice is upheld, according to Bergson, by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of Rene Descartes. Later thinkers such as C. Lloyd Morgan took this work further, elaborating on an 'emergent evolution' that could explain increasing complexity (including the evolution of mind). Morgan found that many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). Finally, the complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution. Recent understanding of human ecosystems and of human impact on the biosphere have led to a link between the notion of sustainability with the "co-evolution" [Norgaard, 1994] and harmonization of cultural and biological evolution.

Some people don't want schools to teach evolution, but they can't stop us from evolving. We can evolve with and without wisdom, with and without loud flashy and beautiful media. We can evolve with or without Time Magazine.

jon posted this at 12:28 AM
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