It hosts
information which is accessible in a few ways, it contains a
memory function, it is multimodal (multimedia - textual,
visual, audio and animation).
I believe that the comparison is not superficial and that
studying the functions of the brain (from infancy to
adulthood) - amounts to perusing the future of the Net itself.
1. The Collective Computer
To carry the metaphor of "a collective brain" further, we
would expect the processing of information to take place in
the Internet, rather than inside the end-user's hardware (the
same way that information is processed in the brain, not in
the eyes). Desktops will receive the results and communicate
with the Net to receive additional clarifications and
instructions and to convey information gathered from their
environment (mostly, from the user).
This is part fo the philosophy of the JAVA programming
language. It deals with applets - small bits of software - and
links different computer platforms by means of software.
Put differently:
Future servers will contain not only information (as they do
today) - but also software applications.
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