Robert Grimes wrote:

   >  a quote from me (in a recent magazine article) was as follows:
   >  ""Anthropologists studying diffusion of innovation of ideas and/or
discoveries
   >  today, might find us, through the Internet, constructing a new type of
world
   >  social neural network at an accelerating rate.

The overarching of this (probably true) description -- "new type of
world social neural network" -- brings to mind a short passage from
Charles C. Mann's piece on copyrighting in The Atlantic Monthly
this month (Sept. 98), 'Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?'
It is the passage which contains these two sentences near its conclusion:
"People came to think that bits -- the 'information' in information theory --
are the same thing as the 'information' that the term ordinarily describes.
But they're not."  And, "digital technology may put transcripts and
video clips of 'The Jerry Springer Show' on thousands of Web sites,
but that doesn't increase the world's store of meaning."

I haven't even finished reading the article yet, but it has given me some
fresh looks at fixed ideas, one of which is the transmorgrification claims
for the world wide web.

It feels like my letdown the first time I ever set up
a satellite dish expecting to catch some new tv programming
I had never seen before ... but it was all old tv programming.

   > Sometimes I wonder if such
   > sustained exposure to new and varied information
   > may not 'overload our registers.'  I anticipate visible symptoms
   > of such overload manifested by participants in
   > modern communication."

Perhaps it is not all so "new," not all so "varied."  (See above.)
But the overload is real.

   > I not only have seen many signs of such sensory overload,
   > but I'm appalled at the flight from reality we are seeing about us
   > when we have the resources to field the most intelligent
   > populace the world has ever seen.

Perhaps this insight sees behind the finding announced in recent news
from, where, Carnegie in Pittsburgh?, to the effect that regular
internet surfers score high in depression indicators.


EK