Internet-Induced Questions

Edge.org is one of the lumpiest, worst-designed sites on the Internet. Which is a shame, because they host some of the most interesting, quirky content out there. Right now, they're aggregating answers to the question "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"

Sample cool submissions:

Professional tech big thinker Clay Shirky:

It's tempting to try to adjudicate the relative value of the network on the way we think by deciding whether access to Wikipedia outweighs access to tentacle porn or the other way around….It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

George Church, director of the Personal Genome Project (sign up!):

The Internet isn't amazing for storage (or math), but for connections. Going from footnotes to hypertext to search-engines dramatically opens doors for evidence-based-thinking, modeling, and collaboration. It transforms itself from mere text to Goggles for places and Picasa for faces.

Of course, these are the questions the Internet really answers: