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This Week:
- Is Google a global brain?
- Places & Culture
- Scrapbook: Harper's Index
- Weekly Digest
Your brain—an organ approximately the size, shape and color of your hands when you clasp them to pray—is a dynamic storage system, an intricate network of neurons that communicate biochemically to yield knowledge.
Say "wires" instead of "neurons" and "electronically" instead of "biochemically," and that last phrase becomes a workable definition of the World Wide Web. Like a brain, the Internet is a mass of links that store and retrieve information. What a computer does when you type a query into the Internet Movie Database is comparable to what your brain does when somebody asks you the name of the lead actor in the movie you each saw on cable last Saturday. You can imagine a little bar on the back of your head that says "Loading . . . " while you fumble for the answer, until it reaches the tip of your tongue and then (on a good day) you blurt it out triumphantly.
But can we really think of the Web as a brain? And with their increasingly complex means of interacting, are computers developing a collective consciousness all their own, as science fiction (most recently The Matrix) has long warned?
In a May 2000 essay for Brill's Content, columnist Steven Johnson wrote that although the answer is clearly no, the reasons why are interesting.
Johnson was responding to the writings of Robert Wright (Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) and the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose notion of the "noosphere" is seen as an anticipation of the "global brain" brought into being by the Web. Drawing on such sources, many thinkers in the Wired set claim that the Internet will create not just a global village, but a global consciousness—an intelligent organ that animated life around the world. "To the extent that the Web has connected more sentient beings than any technology before it, you can see it as a kind of global brain," Johnson said. Just as the collective intelligence of an ant colony is more than just the sum of ants' individual brains, perhaps this global brain would amount to more than just the successful connection of various computers.
Johnson's problem with brain comparisons is that while a healthy brain is organized and coherent, the Web is fundamentally chaotic. He used the analogy of a city, which has streets and zoning and neighborhoods and order. You know where to find things, or at least how to get around. But the Internet isn't the least bit organized, it's just a random mass. "The Web is a space where disorder grows alongside overall volume," Johnson wrote. "The more information that flows into its reservoirs, the harder it becomes to find any single piece of information in that sea." Search directories like Yahoo! (or new clustering engine Vivisimo) are a human effort to impose order on the chaos. But search engines like Google can't rely on any inherent organization in the Web; all Google can do is find words that match what you type in and sites to which the most people have linked. (More about how Google works here and here.)
This struck me as a narrow point for Johnson to make in response to such a broad question, especially since, as he acknowledged, eventual innovations (including the ability to track who's linking to your Web site) would make the Web a little more orderly. A better way to go about it would be to talk about the human brain itself.
The brain is not just a mechanical storage system. It is also an ingredient of the soul. It holds data but, unlike the Web, it also cultivates wisdom. The brain participates in human ways of knowing that are not analogous to computers. When you're in love, you say you "know it in your heart." The Internet can't know this way. It can't imagine. It can't dream. It can't wonder. The brain helps us do all these things. By itself, the Internet never will.
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