User:Wright496

I completely agree that the Internet can be considered one big computer. This is really what cloud computing is all about.Information is stored in and applications run in the "cloud". Every individual and every organization now has these tremendous resources at their disposal.

This obviously has profound implications. Francis Bacon said "Knowlege is power." This is still basically true in an absolute sense but relative to other people it doesn't represent the kind of leverage that it used too. Existing knowlege was harder to come by in those days. Now everyone with a cell phone has the totality of human knowlege at their fingertips wherever they are.

This concept married with open source pretty much yields anarchy in the best sense of the word.The internet is decentralized, diverse and well linked, which means it fits the criteria for the intelligence of a group of people being greater than the sum of the intelligence of its constituents.And it's more than people, it's programs.

So the "cloud" is comprised of the world's computers, programs and essentially the users of those computers as well. The world is more literally at your fingertips than it ever has been. That's something to be excited about.

==The internet changes everything==

The internet hasn't just changed everything about business or software or something else specific. It truly changes everything. Pretty much everything relevant to us is connected through it somehow.

It increases the amount of social interaction people engage in (whether or not this is positive or negative remains to be seen).http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=av59b6DhKtkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA347&dq=effects+internet&ots=V2ClHC0Uid&sig=anpjMnnk8KBA6H75UvCdFLsat3o#v=onepage&q=effects%20internet&f=false , the distinction between consumers and producers is blurred and all knowledge is imeediately available.

The does seem to be a digital divide still http://healthaff.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/19/6/255. I suspect this will close up soon though. In fact this study was from 2003.