Increasingly, I find the digerati to be tedious.

Hall's candidate for the most important invention was not the capture of fire, the printing press, the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of the structure of DNA. The most important invention was ... talking. To illustrate the point, he told a story about a group of prehistoric cavemen having a conversation.

"Guess what?" the first man said. "We're talking." Silence. The others looked at him with suspicion.

"What's 'talking'?" a second man asked.

"It's what we're all doing, right now. We're talking!"

"You're crazy," the third man said. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"I'm not crazy," the first man said. "You're crazy. We're talking."

Talking, undoubtedly, was considered innate and natural until the first man rendered it visible by exclaiming, "We're talking."

A new invention has emerged, a code for the collective conscious, which requires a new way of thinking. The collective externalized mind is the mind we all share. The Internet is the infinite oscillation of our collective conscious interacting with itself. It's not about computers. It's not about what it means to be human — in fact it challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score. It's about thinking. "We're talking."

One of the advantages of having everyday familiarity with the natural world is that it is trivial to avoid this sort of thought trap. Talking wasn't invented. Plants talk to one another, even bacteria talk to one another, and we can listen to them. They don't rattle and hum so much as stink their thoughts, but it is certainly communication carrying information, often at surprisingly great distances.

I'm not naturally equipped with the range of senses to detect all of the cross chatter from all the living species, and I don't know all of the languages well, but I do know that it is always happening and that I can with effort and attention open a port into that great primeval internet and learn a great deal.

I know if there is a snake in the grass before I see or smell it because I understand some of bird and squirrel speech. I know if predatory insects that attack some pasture species are increasing in numbers because I can smell the volatile chemicals emitted by plants to protect themselves and call for assistance from species that prey on the plant's predators. I know if my cattle are well by they way they act.

The communication is often two-way. I spend my days in fussy little dances with everything from rabbits to hawks in which I signal my intentions with subtle movements ranging from the speed and direction of my path to the direction and duration of my gaze - and they do the same. When I see TV shows such as The Dog Whisperer I marvel that there are humans that do not know these things, while at some other level being fully aware of the fact.

We have always been talking. All primates talk. If you must assign a patent to someone I suppose it would have to be some primeval microorganism at the dawn of life. The internet is just a tool - a still primitive tool - that will be replaced before too long just as smoke signals and jungle drums were replaced in the past, just as a bull bellowing his willingness and need to mate is redundant in an era when his semen is extracted by technicians and frozen so that it can be inserted into some heifer a world and years away.