The internet is a brain

There have been many analogies to help explain the internet – but the best analogy is the brain.  Not only is it an analogy – but it’s a direct comparison.  As Jeffrey Stibel says, the internet is not like a brain – it is a brain.

Having a background in neuroscience – it’s easy to see the similarities.  But rather than this just being a compare and contrast exercise, there is good reason to understand why the internet is a brain.  You can look at the way the brain functions to create hyper-awareness of information to help understand how to create hyper-awareness on the internet.

Here are just a few simple examples of brain-internet similarities.

1. The brain is a large network of interconnected neurons, and the internet is a large network of interconnected computers
2. The brain isn’t about neurons, but about communication between neurons, and the internet isn’t about computers but about communication between computers
3. Both the brain and the internet are all about human communication.
4. One of the key ways humans communicate is with language, and one of the key ways that the internet communicates is through keywords (or search terms).
5. The functional unit of the brain is a synapse – the connection between two neurons.  The functional unit of the internet is the hyperlink – the connection between two different locations or webpages (or specific URLs).
6. The more information that passes through a synapse, the ‘stronger’ that synapse becomes.  The more information that passes through a neural pathway, the stronger that neural pathway becomes due to an increase in the number of synapses.  The more traffic that passes through a ‘web pathway’ (through hyperlinks) the stronger that pathway becomes due to an increase in the number of hyperlinks.
7. Because there is ‘too much information’ our brain has filters to reduce the noise and only allow important information through to consciousness.  Because there is too much information on the internet, the internet also has filters to reduce noise and promote important information.  One example of such a filter is Google search.  It filters millions of websites so that it can display the most appropriate website amongst all that noise.  The bigger example is social media, where the crowd is the filter.  The crowd filters information by either sharing it or not sharing it, by ‘liking’ it or ‘not liking it’, by rating it or not rating it, by ‘flagging’ it as inappropriate or not flagging it.
8. We only become aware of something if it passes through our filters and hit’s our consciousness, and we only become aware of something on the internet when it passes through the filters and hit’s our consciousness
9. When a brain becomes consciously aware of information it may amplify the signal to create hyper-awareness – and an example of this is hyper-algesia (a heightened awareness of pain).  Likewise, when an individual becomes consciously  aware of information on the internet they may amplify the signal by sharing or promoting that information to their friends or contacts.  This is the start of something going ‘viral’ and is the mechanism by which the market can create hyper-awareness of a website, song, video, image, product or service.  The internet works to filter out the noise but amplify the signal of something that passes through the filter in order to more clearly evaluate the importance of that signal.  The more people who share a particular ‘thing’ online, the more it get’s shared.  The more that particular thing gets shared, the more the search engines become aware of it and rank it highly in their search results.  The higher the particular ‘thing’ is ranked in search engines, the more people ‘find it’, and the more they find it, the more they share it.

What does all this mean?  Let’s work backwards.  If you want to create hyper-awareness of anything online, be it a product, service, charity, public health message – whatever – then you need to be able to get that information through he filters of the internet so that it reaches the consciousness of the group or market that you’re targeting.  In order to do this, you must understand the filters and how to pass through them.  Those filters are ‘search filters’ (e.g Google) and ‘social filters’ (e.g social media).

The functional unit is “keywords contained in hyperlinks”, and this has now expanded to include images, audio and video contained in hyperlinks.  Still, the ‘keywords’ are at the center of how the internet-brain organizes everything, and so keywords are the essential starting point for any online promotion.

Keywords start out life as ‘an idea’ in someones brain … but that’s for another post.  Thanks for reading.

Tagged as: internet analogy, internet brain, internet marketing, nic lucas