Word: toed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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And the more tethered we become, the faster things change, because the tethers are plugging people into the very social collaboration that drives the change. Science, technology, music, politics--flux in all these realms is hastened by the new electronic synergy. The Internet and allied technologies make us neurons in...
What are we to make of all this in practical terms, philosophical terms, even spiritual terms? How to comprehend an age in which, suddenly, we find ourselves enmeshed in a huge information-processing system, one that seems almost to have a life of its own and to be leading us...
The first step is to delete the word suddenly from that last sentence. For this giant social brain has been taking shape, and hastening change, for a long, long time. Not just since Emerson's day, when the telegraph--sometimes called the "Victorian Internet"--made long-distance contact instantaneous, but...
Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones...
That it took hundreds of thousands of years to get from hand ax to ax with handle suggests that as of 50,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic, the social brain was not humming very vibrantly. There were only 2 million or 3 million "neurons"--a.k.a., people--scattered across the...