To expand on what I wrote in the other thread, this is my personal take on things.
200 years ago if you wanted to learn from someone that wasn't within your immediate sphere (that is, someone you couldn't just go and see easily and quickly, say within the space of one day for no or virtually no cost) you either had to send them a letter, read their book (assuming they had one) or read it in the paper.
At the time, mail was a process which - depending on how far away the people involved lived from each other - could take anywhere from days, to months, and possibly even years to execute what you might call a "wave of transaction" (a request for information followed by a response).
Additionally, public libraries as we understand them today simply didn't exist, limiting the number of people who could access the information within books. On top of that books were few and far between, so even the best stocked library would only contain a tiny fraction of the total number of books in existence at the time.
And newspapers were only available in relatively very few areas, there weren't very many of them, and the only information they contained was what the editor had decided to put in there. The reader had no immediate choice in the matter (though there were various ways to influence things in the longer run,
if you had enough influence).
By about 100 years ago technology had allowed us to improve the speed of the mail, and also added telephones, telegraphs and radio to the mix, reducing the possible time of transmission for a "wave" to seconds, or at most, days or weeks. This hugely increased the speed and frequency of the transmission of information,
more was being communicated
faster.
But even these developments had their limitations, mostly a case that even radio could, at any one time. only transmit a relatively small amount of the information that existed at that time, and in the same way as newspapers what was transmitted was determined by the editor, not the listener.
Additionally the creation of public libraries in the form we know and love today made it possible for a much greater number of people to access the information contained within books, and cheaper and more efficient printing processes, plus a higher level of education amongst a greater number of people, made books far more common than they'd been before, though the problem of libraries only being able to hold a fraction of all those books in existence remained, and the smaller the library the smaller the number of books.
By about 50 years ago we'd improved the number of places connected to telephones and radio (increasing access to and the total amount of the knowledge available at the time through those methods) and we'd also added TV to the mix, making the transmission of live images possible for the first time. Again the speed of a wave and the amount of information that wave contained increased, and public libraries were more common too, but still they could only transmit a relatively tiny amount of the information available.
The invention of the internet has made it possible for (currently) approximately 25% of the human race to access the collected knowledge and opinions of not just the rest of that (currently) approximately 25%, but also the recorded collected knowledge and opinions of humanity stretching back arguably to the dawn of our species, and it's all accessible in virtually an instant.
The limitations of the earlier transmission methods have become almost irrelevant. If it exists and if it's been put on the internet, it can be accessed by roughly 25% of humanity in an instant, and that percentage is only going to increase.
We are able to communicate with each other, as a species, like never before. Ideas that people would not even have
heard of before are now available instantly, all at the touch of a button.
This means that the overall acquired knowledge of the human race is increasing almost exponentially. As a species we have access to more information to make decisions with than ever before, and the more informed someone is the more likely they are to make better decisions ("better" remaining a relative term, if you're of the opinion that the human race in general are about as intelligent as a particularly retarded hamster, then perhaps "more likely to make fewer stupid decisions" might be more accurate).
In short, the internet has made the human race more knowledgeable and therefore arguably
smarter than at any other moment in its history, and that's only set to increase as more is added to the internet by those already on there and more new information is added by new people going on-line.
Also, the faster and more easily information is shared, the faster and more easily new knowledge is created and discovered.
The human race then is not just set to get smarter because they share more about what they already know, it's set to get smarter by building on that information with
new knowledge that's being created faster than ever before too.
Perhaps it's an exaggeration to say that we are at the dawn of a new epoch of mankind, but then again perhaps it's not.
I have to stress that this is for humanity as a
whole. There are plenty of examples of individuals using the internet in ways that make them dumber than ever before too, but I like to think they are vastly outweighed by the rest of us (assuming, of course, that I'm not one of the increasingly dumber group.
).
EDIT: How all this relates to the OP is that I think well informed people making better decisions are likely to come to the same sorts of conclusions about certain things more often than people who aren't so well informed, so it can perhaps seem that through the information sharing power of the internet we are all beginning to "think as one" a little bit more than we used to.
