Twitter, Facebook, and (Web) Intelligence
I recently read this quite amusing article on telegraph.co.uk (you might have read it on some other news site). Dr. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist, has claimed that using Facebook enhances intelligence while using Twitter may have the opposite effect. That is due to the training of the working memory while maintaing one’s Facebook pages. In contrast, sending tweets will reduce your working memory abilities, which also holds true for sending SMS messages. Having about 300 mio Facebook users, maybe about 4.5 million twitter users and about 3.5 billion mobile phone users, mankind is clearly doomed. That’s another take on Web Intelligence.
More seriously for those who are interested in the topic of intelligence (as in cognition) and Web 2.0 I recommend to look into the subject matter of collective intelligence. Web 2.0 lives from sharing and collaboration. Programs can use this information pool generated by contributors to distill new knowledge and to mimic intelligent behavior.
