The Packetization of Consciousness

David Schatsky | March 29, 2007, 10:22 AM

A simple idea can have profound consequences, nearly limitless applications and bring tranformations far afield from the domain where that idea is originally conceived and applied.

That's the message of the fun opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal by Daniel Henninger.

His focus is the idea of packet switched networks, a concept at the heart of the Internet, one that is simple, yet which has been challenging and often displacing paradigm of circuit switched networks, the dominant telecommunications architecture for over a hundred years.

Henninger's idea is that the dominance of packet switching as a paradigm has lept from the domain of networking and telecommunications to the realm of politics and, I would say, to conciousness itself. (What a challenge for us linear thinkers).

Read the piece to find out why. And consider that the fingerprints of the Internet are all over other ideas that are remaking commerce, media and society.