In the beginning, we talked face to face. Communication was great, but it was also slow.
Then phones came out and you could talk to people from far away. Communication became faster.
Then the internet came out and you could talk to way more people simultaneously and/or asynchronously with people you didn't even know, communication became even faster and each person became connected to more people.
We slowly begin to get dumber as we as a group become more intelligent (the way single celled organisms gave way to multi celled organisms where each cell became more and more specialized).
The collective brain becomes more intelligent with the internet as the binding force.
These thoughts grows from an article a friend sent me long ago called We are the web.
"Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning."
- Kevin Kelly in We Are the Web
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html
