This past Tuesday, I witnessed something extraordinary. No, not the Rangers clinch against the Rays or a dormitory hallway covered in fire extinguisher chemicals (though both certainly happened), but rather a miracle of modern technology and the human spirit. Sitting on my couch, looking at a fifteen-inch screen, I watched as, one-by-one, men were lifted from a mineshaft nearly 5000 miles away.
I watched as friends on Facebook and Twitter shared their thoughts and support in real time as the miners emerged from the hole and fell into the arms of friends and loved ones. Both the rescue itself and the collective response left me in awe, though not for the obvious reasons.
The day before, Wikipedia founder and Alabama alumnus Jimmy Wales penned an open letter to Wikipedia users. In it, he asked users to “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” A profound thought for sure, but what about a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of human experiences?
Tuesday night, that’s exactly what happened. Maybe we reached this point before Tuesday, but has it ever been more perfectly illustrated?
The Internet has brought us together in unprecedented ways. It allows people to share experiences from hundreds of different locations around the world simply by logging in to the same website at a given moment. But it doesn’t stop there – the Internet is actually making you smarter.
A common opinion among older generations is that the pervasive use of the Internet has made its users dumber, less attentive individuals. Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember,” writes that the constant stimulation provided by ever-present links and quick doses of information delivered 140 characters at a time decreases our ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. He cites the Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote, “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
With no offense to Seneca, in the age of instant information, to be everywhere is to know everything. I may not be able to recite the preamble to the Constitution (and let’s be honest, we all forgot it after 8th grade civics class), but by the time you finish reading this sentence I could have it up on my browser. And with the rapid development of smart phones, the Internet as a resource is omnipresent. We no longer need to store endless pieces of information in our minds – we just have to know how to find it.
Think of the cell phone; before it, people had to memorize numerous phone numbers or store them on paper (remember the Rolodex?). After its invention, all those numbers could be stored internally. The Internet is the same way, but on a much grander scale. We have created the cloud of collective information Mr. Wales refers to, and all it takes is a simple Internet connection.
It may not be the singularity, but it’s pretty damn close, and it’s pretty damn cool.
