Grasshopper7256 wishes that grasshopper3498 would stop rubbing his legs against him. Urge to march and destroy is rising! #swarm #locusts

So then young grasshopper, will you evolve into a wise adult or turn into a swarming locust? And can you describe the experience in less then 140 characters?

I read a story in New Scientist last month (thanks to comrade Vicky for the link) that locusts are basically flashmobbing socialized grasshoppers. Grasshopper populations explode when the rains come and food is plentiful, then as the land dries out and vegetation dies back the normally solitary creatures are forced together. The proximity of the other locusts trigger behavioural and physiological changes, a serotonin surge in the central nervous system causes them to march (or fly) in an orderly fashion. They swarm on any vegetation they can find leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

This swarming effect can be compared to what is happening with the World Wide Web. Social networking has allowed us to become more connected than ever before, we now live in a constant feedback loop of live information about our friends, our family and our colleagues. Could this be our equivalent of the swarm? Earlier this year BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution theorised that we are evolving into Homo Interneticus, a super connected, socialized breed of human. They conducted the ‘Fox or Hedgehog’ experiment that tested our behaviour and found a shift in the younger generation from the single minded, diligent and peer reviewing (fearing?) hedgehog of old towards the bouncy, all embracing, socially led fox. The key to this is associated knowledge, why do I need to know or learn anything when I have Google or Twitter to tell me? I’ve noticed changes in my own working behaviour, my best work comes in quick bursts interspersed with micro breaks where I’ll dive into a social network or blog reader for a few seconds and look at something else. This seems to reset my brain and prepare it to solve the next problem or take the next step. Cut me off and force me to work on just one thing and I will soon hit a brick wall.

So where is all this leading us? If you follow the swarming locust process it leads to the consumption of all available resources followed by cannibalism and a population nose dive. Though there is hope, if you look to the grasshoppers cousin* the bee, bees also live in social groups, though they collaborate for the good of the hive. Science fiction tends to lean more to the swarm then the hive, its not hard to come up with some scary tales of the hive gone wrong, just look at the Cybermen or the Borg, lets hope we don’t experience the Star Trek effect and make our own worst nightmares a reality. Perhaps some of our Sci Fi writers can imagine a more rosey collective in some future stories? Personally I am looking forward to it, I’m ready to throw of the shackles of individuality and hurl myself into the collective, I will laugh in the face of the technophobes and Chinese burn the arm of privacy.

As the swarming masses of Monty Python say: ‘Yes, we are all individuals.”

*Warning: I’m not an entomologist so cannot confirm if grasshoppers and bees are really cousins

Grasshopper Image courtesy of e-du, used on a creative commons license