Nearly 10,000 U.S. adults were asked in a survey: How likely would you be to implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely? 11% of the responses were prone to accepting such a perspective.

Marshall Kirkpatrick expressed today his opposition to the idea of an “internet brain implant“.

I find the notion of a web chip (a chip in general actually) oblique as it is; but it also makes me think. The points, that Marshall highlights are well argumented, but I believe we are already addicted to technology in a very high degree. I talk about a degree, where technology (the web, mobile phones, ipods, whatever) are already implanted to our (at least mental) existence. We can’t step out of our front door without our mobile phones and we can’t pass couple of days without checking our emails (I don’t know about you, but without internet I feel physically weak). The notion of media as extensions of ourselves (expressed by McLuhan) is becoming more realistic every day. Let me elaborate.

• Privacy. Marshall Kirkpatrick sees the idea of ‘privacy as an illusion’ nowadays as a hyperbole. I disagree. Anyone can easily ‘google’ your name and find information about you. Your habits online are open for anyone to see. And even without google, we have blogs, facebook, myspace and hundreds more communities which in one way or another define us. But also the mobile culture, leaves little room to privacy. We are reachable everywhere and anytime. Just call. And have you noticed someting else? When someone calls us on the mobile phone, his first question is: Where are you? Privacy has a completely new meaning nowadays.
• Information overload. We are facing a paradox. On the one hand people complain about the information overload. On the other hand though, this overload has enabled a democratizition of media, given the public an incomparable variety of choices and encouraged a whole economics about the long trail of the web. We are standing between a paradise of choice and a paradox of choice. Maybe our hands are too slow to get to all this information (as Marshall Kirkpatrick says). But only because they just receive instructions from our brain, bacause they are mediators. So maybe it would be better if we would let our brain do the work. Forget mediators.

Services like twitter show that maybe people don’t want “…a private place to hatch [their] plots”. They don’t even care for the information overload. Maybe they just need to be constantly occupied, to be in constant socialization. Information like “I’m waiting for my roommate to wake up, so that we can clean up the house” or “just put the kids to bed. ready for bed myself” REALLY make me think.

If I were to summarize my argument it would be: We are already addicted to some media and use them so often, as if they were an implant in our heads. Under that perspective, I don’t see the difference.

I suppose such an internet chip, could make many popular technologies obsolete. Who would need a mobile phone, an ipod or a laptop? You got it all in your head. When you want to be alone (if ever) just state ‘out for lunch’ or ‘brb’ or even ‘offline’.

And you can cheat on exams, just wiki everything. If you dare to trust wikipedia.

Boring meeting? Play World of Warcraft.

Boring sex life? Let your ‘imagination’ free.

After all its all in your head.

And if you are skeptical about the big vendors controlling your brain chip, install linux.