I walked through an exhibit of ants at the Natural History Museum in Washington this weekend. My first thought: "What the hell, Ants? I've seen the movie, I get them..." But no, I don't get them. The exhibit wasn't very long or particularly well done, but it was good enough to imprint upon me just how socially evolved ants are and how, in someways, they are a bit similar to humans.

I feel like the term "hive mind" carries a lot of stigma with it. It shouldn't. It's an evolutionary phenomena that has been in the works for millions of years and has helped make ants one of the most successful organisms in the world. There are more than 12,000 species of ants today that inhabit every continent except Antarctica. The hive mind entered into a serious love affair with science fiction a long time ago and hasn't really left the realm of fantasy. It's been applied to alien races and even to humans with some extent. But we don't really fit the bill.

The word individual means an entirely different thing for an ant. The ant is a part of its colony in a way humans do not relate with society. The individual is the colony and the single ants act accordingly, much like a limb to a body. Ants are tailored to very certain roles from birth, a form of specialization that extends to the point of birthing sterile ants. That sounds like a rather sinister type of Fordism. There are even ants who know to forsake their lives for the queen and for the colony.

So what does this have to do with us? We don't live underground and I ain't jumping off no cliff for any queen. I am too lazy to be a worker and the idea of society being greater than me is laughable. I stomp off all over society with a capital i. But, it's really hard no to think of humans as a bit like ants. I mean not in the gruesome imagining of city like colonies and apartment building complexes with human sized insects cooking dinner, but in the idea of societal norms and doing what is expected of us, and to some extent the internet.

While to an ant the word "we" is really the same as "I" humans are individual creatures with their own colony made inside our heads. Yes, we are born into social colonies. We only come with one flavor of family, we are dependent on our neighborhoods, cultures, and geographical locations. But to us, those are all very elastic boundaries. There is nothing keeping us from exporting our bodies to different colonies all over the world. And now with the internet we can bring our anthill along with us. Think of your facebook  friend list as your colony. Those are generally speaking the people you care most about in the world (and if your older family members aren't on now, they will be soon) And with practically live updating how different are we from ants really? If I can twitter to my roommate, pick up some meat loaf on the way home, aren't I just telling a worker ant to go hunt for food?My roommate isn't a working ant of course, but you see my point.

Twitter and social units online like this one have the potential to change the way society works, in fact they already are doing that, but might there be a day when our understanding of civilization changes? Think about how the internet operates to the individual. The software being programmed to know you as the user is getting better. Isn't that in some sense specialization? It knows how to interact with you so both parties become more efficient?

 Or am I just being overly sci-fi? Count the number of times I used the word I in this post to find out just how collective we really are.