What, no mention of the Borg? They have constant awareness of each other and consider it jarring when someone "drops off the grid"... they suffer real problems with an environment that fosters "epistemic closure"... better analog for social networking than the Great Link, IMHO.
I think we might be heading more to being like the Borg.. :-)
It has its advantages -- I could use nano upgrades for quite a few things.
But there is a key difference between the internet and the Borg technology. Borg tech was based on voice (e.g the episode in which the first officer of Voyager is temporarily connected to some subgroup of borgs) whereas the internet is based on text (we have video, but even on Facebook, most of what people share is text-based) and where the Borg is synchronous, we are mostly asynchronous. In both cases this helps us to scale the networks better.
The reason text is used for thought encoding right now is that at the current level of technology text offers very good price/performance for ease of production, delivery and retaining and at same time provides reasonable accuracy and information density.
At the era of brain implants when you will "look" at the website, you'll "see" thoughts, ideas and memories, not text, pictures and video.
What, no mention of the Borg? They have constant awareness of each other and consider it jarring when someone "drops off the grid"... they suffer real problems with an environment that fosters "epistemic closure"... better analog for social networking than the Great Link, IMHO.
I think we might be heading more to being like the Borg.. :-)