How will the internet change the way we think?

Our families, our communities and our culture make us what we are. Once we are what we are, we are still unthinkable outside our groups with whom we live. On a desert island we’ll form an association with a ball if we can find one. So if a new infrastructure comes along that allows us to connect with everyone else on the planet and to invent new types of connections, this is big news indeed! This is the case with Internet. It gives us an opportunity to rethink many of our presuppositions about our nature and our world’s nature. Our social connections until now have been constrained by geography and atoms: the real world. The Web is an unnatural world, one we have been built for ourselves. The facts of nature drop out of the Web. We can see reflected in the Web just how much of our sociality is due not to the nature of the real world but to the nature of ourselves. The Web confronts us with the brute fact that we are creatures who cares about ourselves and the world we share with others. We live within a context of meaning: the world is richer with meaning than we can imagine.