I was struck by such idea. I wondered how such an interface will definitely change how we interact with information and will remove any distinction between what happen "on-line" and "off-line", as we do now. We will be on-line all the time. We could make a post to our blog while we are witnessing an event, or start a chat with our wife to decide to buy that home appliance, or read that important email in the middle of a meeting just in time to avoid a unthinkable error. . . options are endless and the impact impossible to foresee.
But having ubiquitous, seamless, access to Internet could change more dramatically our lives and even our society, as the author portraits in one brief but nevertheless disturbing passage in the novel:
He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, their old-fashioned way.
"thinking about it, the old-fashioned way". What a powerful image: People who is so used to go to the Internet at any moment during a conversation to find information, that doesn't think about things anymore.
My first reaction was to consider that such reliance on an "external" source will lead to mindless people. But, latter I realized I was considering just a part of the picture and missing a very important one: that information taken from Internet would very probably come from a social network, "a la web 2.0". Therefore, will be more that just raw information, but the result of a social process, full of interactions, discussions, refinement.
But this is even more disturbing: we will then end-up replacing our personal, immediate (and non mediate) thoughts about a situation by the corresponding "social thoughts". Will we then lose any change of dissension on the commonly accepted criteria? Will we be transformed in mere ants is a connected society?
