A Reading from Class

This week in my "Collaborating in Online Communities" class, we were assigned a reading excerpt from the book written by Pierre Levy called "Collective Intelligence". During class we briefly went over a paragraph from this excerpt and it stuck out to me as something worth blogging about.

"This new nomadism will not develop within any known geographic territory, institution, or state, but with in an invisible space of understanding, knowledge, and intellectual power, within which new qualities of being and new ways of fashioning a society will flourish and mutate. Not the space of organization charts and business statistics, but the qualitative, dynamic, living space of a humanity in the process of inventing itself through the creation of its world."-Pierre Levy

This book was published in 1997 when the internet was in a rather primitive state, yet somehow Levy was able to somewhat forsee the future of how dominant the internet would be in the future. He describes the internet as this new nomadism, describing the internet as free roaming and mobile. He states that the internet is not a physical object but it is an invisible space of knowledge which will mutate society. The internet has completely changed how the world works from how it did maybe 20 years ago. He also says that the internet is in a process of inventing itself through the creation of it's world. "It's world" is the online space that is always growing larger every day. It struck me amazing that someone could be so spot on about the internet and its power back when it was so much smaller and than it is today. Personally I cannot imagine just thinking of what it would be like to be reminiscing over the thought of this invisible space of understanding back then. It made me wonder if there would ever be something newer and better than the internet that accomplishes more that will be invented. Here is a video just showing how much of a primitive state the internet was in compared to today around the time this book was written.