I’ve just picked up an interview that Derrick De Kerckhove gave a year ago in TheFeature :: It’s All About The Mobile Internet. Here’s why I blog it.
I’m in the process of trying to organize my thoughts about the impact of social software on creative networks and evolution. Typically, when I have an intriguing, novel thought, I google it and find out that there’s at least dozen other web-connected minds that have already thought of it. Their perspectives about the same enhances mine and taking them in, comparing them with mine, accelerates my learning, helps me finding the niche for the baby thought.
A small step in our individual discovery processes, such as refining a meme in tele-collaboration with colleagues and strangers, is a huge step for humankind. It means that the inter-penetration and co-specialization of our individual and collective intelligence aren’t a stuff of futurist dreams, they’re happening here and now, as we speak.
My googling of “creative networks” and “evolution” led me to the May-June 2002 aechive of Eccentric Eclectica, a blog, in which “Todd Suomela meets the web and tries to come out ahead… .” I have no idea who Todd Suomela is but am tremendously grateful to him for putting in his blog a quote from and a link to the interview, in which De Kerckhove said:
Ever more efficient search engines are making that access not just merely pertinent but “hypertinent” which is the logic of the memory in our brains. Every time we think, we summon the most pertinent information available in our mind. Imagine having the same kind of access to the contents of everybody else’s mind at once. It’s quite literally mind-boggling.
Hypertinence keeps gaining momentum through the emergence of the current crop of social software (blogs, wikis, p2p forums, free co-authoring and translation tools and services, etc.) that has all the signs of true communication revolution. That should be the subject of another entry. So is the the role that co-creative dialogues between social software makers and practitioners can play in the democratization of the means of boosting our intelligence, individual and collective.