More Internet Musings

Two blogs ago, I made casual mention of the idea that the Internet has become a communal extension of my brain. I also toyed with the idea that maybe parts of my brain are beginning to atrophy -- or perhaps to be reallocated to another purpose because of disuse. All thanks to the convenience of the knowledge bank that Google puts at my fingertips.

In response, my friend Ross - who is a bona fide member of the technorati and way smarter than I - sent me a link to this fascinating 2003 article, in which author William Gibson expresses some of these same ideas (in a far more interesting way than I did, of course). You can read it yourself, but something I found really cool about it was that someone called Vannevar Bush envisioned something very like the Internet (in structure and purpose), way back in 1945.

For me, this reaffirms a couple of things that have been percolating on the outer edges of my intuition...

One, that the Internet and other modern technologies are in many ways an extension of the way we naturally think and act. Hyperlinks on web pages function much the same way that the human mind functions when processing thoughts and emotions: creating idea-related pathways that spider out in a multitude of directions, rather than a linear path that we simply scroll from top to bottom. Part of my job as a therapist is to try to follow that path, and figure out which "pages" are important, and which are just pass-throughs and distractions on the way to the important stuff.

Secondly, reading about Mr. Bush and his early, limited conceptions of an Internet-like machine, I can't help but wonder who will envision the next major human advance. Maybe it will be one of Bill Gates' or Steve Jobbs' followers, going to work each day on a vast technology campus. Or a part of the military machine, in an eternal race for dominance. Or maybe it will be a science-fiction writer, avid game player, or amateur poet. Someone whose creative energy surpasses the boundaries and limitations of the conceivable, and begins to explore instead the possible.

It seems that Vannevar Bush was a little of all of these things, in his way. It's hard to know if his primitive conceptualization of the Internet was born of professional practicality, free-ranging fantasy, or a little of both. In either case, I like this idea, because it at least hints at the possibility that any of us might create the seed of the the next revolutionary idea -- regardless of the capacity in which we are currently serving mankind.

It may mean that those random daydreams and seemingly silly thoughts we all have sometimes might actually be a window - not just to ourselves but to the future. I don't know about you, but the possibility of future greatness gives me a sort of permission to give in to those thoughts once in a while. Maybe I'll take a few extra moments to stare out the window next time before hurrying back to work.