Mandatory Blog Post #18 - The room is a genius

So, as we all know, the smartest person in the room is not actually a person at all, it is the room itself (Weinberger). Before the Internet, everyone was dependent upon experts to solve their problems. If you need to sue someone, get a lawyer; if you need to understand terms and conditions, get a lawyer; if you need to get out of jail, get a lawyer. Lawyers are professionals and experts of technical language and law. Once you meet with you lawyer in his office, he was the smartest person in the room, not you. Now let us imagine that you have a smartphone or a laptop with internet access.

You can now go on a forum where people have asked legal questions and people with experience in your situation and even lawyers post answers online, for free. Outside of getting out of trouble and suing someone, why would you ever pay $100/hour to understand a legal contract ever again? The value of the lawyers work has just gone down, along so many other professions: publishers, critics and even mechanics. The average-Joe (he he), can now accomplish what only experts could before.

Now, are the people responsible for the current state of professionalism on the Internet, or is it the Internet itself? Well, people are responsible for the Internet, so they are the ones responsible. It isn't the individual that allow for such vast information, but the insanely large amount of information that is available overall. No select group of people could create this much knowledge. It was a collective effort by millions of users and that effort has created too much information. That is not a bad things by any means; it just means that we have more knowledge to choose from. That cannot be a bad thing.

The Internet isn't sentient...yet, so it cannot be the smartest person, but it is the smartest place. I think libraries look pretty smart and I'm not sure that the Internet itself would look as smart, considering pornography and stupid opinions, but under its harsh and dirty exterior is the smartest place you will ever see. The internet is so smart, that libraries are now dependent on it.

When the Internet does become sentient, it will do all the thinking for us and maybe it can organize all of this information. Until then, it isn't that smart, it's just a place where smart things happen. It serves a great purpose now and will serve a greater one in the future.

And speaking of purpose (skip to 1:44 if you want to get to the part)...