The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model

By Francis Heylighen & Johan Bollen

If society is viewed as a super-organism, communication networks play the role of its brain. This metaphor is developed into a model for the design of a more intelligent global network. The World-Wide Web, through its distributed hypermedia architecture, functions as an "associative memory", which may "learn" by the strengthening of frequently used links. Software agents,...