“When I do long divi­sion or even mul­ti­pli­ca­tion I don’t try to remem­ber the inter­me­di­ate num­bers. Long ago I learned to write them down. Because of paper and pen­cil I am “smarter” in arith­metic. In a sim­i­lar man­ner I now no longer to try remem­ber facts, or even where I found the facts. I have learned to sum­mon them on the Inter­net. Because the Inter­net is my new pen­cil and paper, I am “smarter” in factuality.

But my knowl­edge is now more frag­ile. For every accepted piece of knowl­edge I find, there is within easy reach some­one who chal­lenges the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet’s extreme hyper­link­ing high­lights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts. Some anti-facts are silly, some bor­der­line, and some valid. You can’t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and coun­ter­vail­ing anti-expert. Thus any­thing I learn is sub­ject to ero­sion by these ubiq­ui­tous anti-factors.”

–

“We don’t really know what dreams are for, only that they sat­isfy some fun­da­men­tal need. Some­one watch­ing me surf the Web, as I jump from one sug­gested link to another, would see a day-dream. Today, I was in a crowd of peo­ple who watched a bare­foot man eat dirt, then the face of a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christ­mas tree, then I was float­ing inside mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied them­selves, then a guy told me the for­mula for mak­ing clear glass, then I was watch­ing myself, back in high school, rid­ing a bicy­cle. And that was just the first few min­utes of my day on the Web this morn­ing. The trance-like state we fall into while fol­low­ing the undi­rected path of links may be a ter­ri­ble waste of time, or like dreams, it might be a pro­duc­tive waste of time. Per­haps we are tap­ping into our col­lec­tive uncon­scious in a way watch­ing the directed stream of TV, radio and news­pa­pers could not. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, inde­pen­dent of what we click on.”

–Kevin Kelly

Read the rest of Kevin Kelly’s fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the inter­net is chang­ing our minds on his web­site kk.org