The Rise of the Social Nervous System

Joshua Michele-Ross published an informed piece for Forbes Magazine called The Rise of the Social Nervous System. His essential argument is that communication is the foundation of society, business and government. The internet scales up the capacity for this communication and at the same time renders services and coordinates action from humans input. He calls this the rise of the social nervous system.

Josh focuses on now familiar examples: the Mumbai terrorist attacks as reported real-time on twitter, the Obama campaign (and in particular, the Houdini project), and Google Flu Trends. But Josh weaves them into a powerful conclusion:

"Watch the news, and you will see daily evidence of how a system that connects billions of people is influencing the physical world- from recent protests in California against Proposition 8 organized by Facebook to the riots in my hometown of Oakland after several witnesses uploaded video taken from their mobile phones of a police shooting."

Josh explains that key to the Web 2.0 experience is the notion of harnessing collective intelligence; examples of this can be seen in the way that wikipedia allows user generated content, or the way in which Amazon stays ahead of its competitors with the plethora of ways that users can contribute to their website and how that data is then used. But these effect are no longer limited to cyberspace and have an impact on real world activity.

Josh points out that these effects are not limited to cyberspace, but are used to control and coordinate real-world activity. This is the new frontier, moving from "sensing" to "reacting," from "cognition" to "coordination" and group action.

Many of the most successful Web 2.0 system derived their success from implicit rather than explicit data, the contribution made by simply clicking a link from one site to another that is recorded and used by Google to affect page ranking. One of the questions which Web 2.0 writers are struggling to answer is how far does this interaction go. When buy by credit card, we don't think we are contributing, but software at the bank, the merchant, and our personal finance application is listening to that credit card reader.

Those applications will share and sense not just words passed from human to human across services like Twitter, or our search behaviour but sounds, pictures, and increasingly, data from senses that unaided humans don't possess at all, or less precisely: a sense of precise location, or the rate of speed at which we move, the power we consume, the carbon we emit, the approaching weather, the state of the financial markets, the unique sequence of our genome, or even the way we smell.

The next great fortunes will be made by the people who discover how to build a system that reacts to one of the Internet's new senses.

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