Brains working towards machine consciousness

In many ways, your Personal Learning Network is like a personal Community of Practice.  Something about the people you choose to have in your PLN links them to the things you want to learn, in the ways you want to learn it.  You get to decide who is in your PLN, adding and removing people in order to meet your learning needs.  Consequently, you are the 'benign dictator' in a network of people who may not even realise that they are a part of it.  Additionally, of course, each of those individuals has their own network, of which you may, or may not, be part.