A journalistic take on what is essentially active externalism or the thesis of the extended mind. David Brooks (yes, THAT David Brooks) implicitly refers to notions of collaborative filtering, swarming, stigmergy, and even memetics.
Of course, one suspects that Brooks has only the slighest conceptual inkling of what’s going on. Notions of the extended mind enjoy currency both in academic and popular literature: the ‘‘global brain,’’ ‘‘smart mobs,’’ ‘‘wisdom of crowds,’’ ‘‘common wisdom,’’ and so on – metaphors that seem to trade either upon an utopian hell or a laissez-faire world underwritten by an uncritical techno-ebullience.
manwithoutqualities 