Mayfield's Web of verbs

Ross Mayfield points out how the Internet is becoming less of a place (cyberspace) and more of a way to socialize and tap into groups: "The Web's greater innovation over the past couple of years has not been about technology or personal productivity, but enhancing our capabilities to act with groups," he said in his blog.  He goes on to explain how NetGens use the Web: "They Google, Flickr, Blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate and above all share."  

While thinking about this came to mind something Stephen Hawking once said about how the ultimate destination of the human race is to be connected as closely as the neurons in a human brain. Coming Internet innovations aside, if this group phenomenon Mayfield speaks of eventually becomes the collective consciousness of our "post-human" existence in say the next fifty to a hundred years, can the coming age of M2M (machine-to-machine) communications be considered the underlying sub consciousness? 

Ok, enough of the cyber-babble, we got more pressing concerns.