20,000 Synaptic E-mails From This “Cell”

I recently checked how many e-mails I sent and received in the past year: In my primary account I received about 13,000 messages (not counting spam, which was abundant) and sent about 6,000. My other e-mail accounts easily add another thousand bringing the grand total to around 20,000 messages. The aspect which I find striking is that this communication represents 20,000 unique interactions between my thoughts and the thoughts of others [actually much more since many of these e-mails had multiple recipients including some listservs with thousands of individual subscribers.] Before 10 years ago, this communication was not possible. This is truly a revolution in human communication and interconnectedness. I would liken this communication to the workings of an individual brain. The connections between neurons are filled with constantly firing synapses as brain cells communicate with each other. I think that Internet traffic (web browsing and e-mail in particular) are the firing synapses of our collective Internet “brain.” Whether this will lead toward a collective consciousness or Borgish hive mentality remains to be seen, but I certainly hope it's the former. I'm intrigued by the way the Internet mirrors an individual brain, like fractals which mirror themselves in micro or macro perspective.