There’s a really interesting three-part News.com series, and part two appeared in today’s IT News Digest newsletter: “From ape to ‘Homo digitas’?” (http://www.techrepublic.com/2100-3513_11-5873735.html) 

Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, claims that a new species–called “Homo digitas”–has emerged in recent years. This species, according to Zittrain, “(Is) someone glued to a chair, focused on a screen, interacting as an object, a person whose main identification is as a digital creature, who doesn’t know what to do without a signal.”

The question that philosophers, technologists, and writers are debating is whether innovations and new technologies make us more intelligent. Are the modern, computer-using Homo digitas is any more intelligent than the good, old-fashioned Homo sapien? Which Homo are you?

I started a discussion on part-one of this series yesterday. Find out what your fellow IT peers had to say: http://www.techrepublic.com/5208-11195-0.html?forumID=87&threadID=181415

[FYI: Part-three of this series, which will discuss how technology affects intelligence, is slated to publish tomorrow. I’ll be sure to include the link when the story is live.]