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With a capital “A”. Seriously, since Web 2.0 started to really roll out and more and more sites started to adopt its philosophy I’ve noticed a complete paradigm shift in what the Internet means to me. I literally love the internet now whereas maybe 2 years ago I was becoming increasingly disillusioned as to its real world merits. It was becoming like TV, I was merely flicking through my favorite sites on a daily basis, reading my usual RSS feeds and then switching it off.

However things started to change a while back when a friend pointed me in the direction of this new toolbar called “Stumbleupon”. My whole life I have hated additional toolbars in browsers, all to often I’ve had to clean out a friends PC only to see the myriad of toolbars they have installed that are there due to a virus or are slowing down their computer because they are bloated and poorly coded. So when I was told about this “must have” toolbar, I took the advice with a pinch of salt.

I did my research and found nothing but praise for it, so I signed up and installed it. What got me first was its pure simplicity. You select your favorite topics then merely click the “Stumble” button and you’ll be given a page related to your interests that hundreds of people around the world have voted as being relevant. You can then give the page a thumbs up or down depending on how interesting you found the page.

This in itself was a “Wow!” moment for me. Sure it was superseded by the likes of Digg, Reddit or any of the other link sites, but in my opinion Stumbleupon is the first Web 2.0 app that has truly captured the essence of social networking. It was the first time that I felt I was interacting with the Internet in a “human” fashion. When I meet up with my friends, I do not have to always ask “What movies have you seen recently that are good”, a lot of the time they will nominate this information without me having to ask, and the more you think about it the more you realize this is how humanity progresses in reality. Search engines like Google or Yahoo assume the user already knows the question when they visit their site, humans don’t, humans wish to pass on information regardless of whether the individual they are passing it to has requested it.

This paradigm shift in internet browsing has changed everything for me. When I open my browser I know the internet is about to start a conversation with me on topics i’m interested in and maybe some it knows I should be interested in. When I click the stumble button hundreds of people start saying “Oh you have to see this site, it’s amazing”. Also, stumbleupon allows me to search all of its recommendations for ones that contain specific information to my inquiry. Now instead of having to rely on an internet robot to tell me which site is most relevant to my search I can find pages that I know actual humans have looked at, read and said “Yeah, this site would be perfect for you”. On a daily basis now I feel I am absorbing 10 times the amount of information I was previously, so much so that when I’m not reading about new world developments or checking out the latest memes my brain starts to feel “itchy” like it needs to be scratched with some new information. The brain is a muscle like any other and I liken this feeling to one a long distance runner must feel if they are made to sit still for long periods of time. We are at a point now where not only is the information of the world at our fingertips but we have the tools to consume, produce and share it. Previous to our generation, no humans in history had the ability of tapping into this amount of human thinking, knowledge and wisdom.

Below I have linked a great talk by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo this year in regards to what he calls “Cognitive Surplus”. His thoughts on it and its implications for the future of the internet and mankinds interaction with it are exciting to say the least. Cognitive Surplus is the thinking time we have that is not utilized by any organized means. For most of us 8 hours of cognisance is used for work every day but the rest is “surplus”. Previous to our generation this surplus was wasted on the consumer mediums of TV, radio, literature… etc. But now with the advent of social networking humans can use this surplus to create and share as well as consume information. What this utilizing of human cognisance will yield is yet to be seen, but if the internet at present is anything to go by, it looks like exciting times ahead.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under IT, Thought.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.