Is The Internet A Living Thing?

I was at my sisters who is a research scientist and came across an article in NewScientist journal. The article was about religeon but it made a point about the cognitive thinking patterns of the human brain, which stated,

“One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have seperate cognitive systems for dealing with living things- things with minds, or at least volition – and inanimate objects” (Micheal Brooks 4th  February 2009).

It goes on to say how even babies as young as 5 months old make this distinction, and react differently accordingly. This got me thinking about how people use the internet to communicate. The invisibility of difference may very well be more about making the distinction that we are communicating with people and not machines over the internet, than anything to do with the difference in culture, hardware or any other unseen limitations.

So this poses the question is the internet a living thing?  Should we be treating it as such in order to effectively communicate to the people who use it, and make the clear distinction between how we respond to living things and the way we percieve inaminate objects differently.

It would be interesting to hear what others thoughts are about this concept.

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