I read The Celestine Prophecy when I was a sophomore in high school (holy shit, they're making a movie out of it!). Actually, my high school German teacher gave me a copy as a result of some conversations we had about metaphysics. The book is a poorly written yet compelling story about a lot of ideas like energy fields, synchronicity, finding your purpose in life, etc. Hippy stuff, told in an almost Clancy-esque narrative style (ok, maybe that's stretching it).
I took a lot of insights from that book into my own life. A lot of those insights made sense, such as dealing with children in an honest and non-condescending manner, how a child integrates the parents' personalities, how intentions determine outcomes, stuff like that. Later, I found out that the whole adventure was not a first hand account, but fiction (one of my more naive moments - I was thoroughly disappointed).
Anyway, the book did have an impact on me, and one of the ideas I took from it was that humans are rediscovering their hidden potential in this age. We have the latent ability to do telepathy, receive accurate premonitions, and affect situations with out thoughts and feelings. You may not believe we have that capability, and that's fine, because it's not important to my point, as I will explain.
The book also argued that our technological progress is a forebearer of our developing personal abilities. In other words, the invention and widespread use of televisions and telephones prepares humans for the coming ability to see and communicate with people and things at a distance. Speedy travel like automobiles, flight, etc. are preparing us for out own ability to circumlocate our consciousness quickly. To summarize, technology is a kind of germ that begins to train us to use our innate but unexpressed abilities more fully - essentially giving us the training wheels for (what I now realize are) fourth density faculties (there is already some talk in the mainstream about this).
This has special significance for me, given my chosen field of web development. It's an exciting time in my field - we are finally starting to move out of internet infancy. Sure, the web was talked up during the nineties as completely redefining everything and blah blah blah. You could find and publish information quickly and easily. And that's great, but that's a pretty one-dimensional way to look at the rich interactions of society.
Enter Web2.0: the social side of the internet. Originally coined by Tim O'Reilly, the term describes a way of using the internet that doesn't just facilitate interaction, but uses it to dynamically and spontaneously enhance the interactions, thereby building upon and extending the usability and richness of the web (among other things). It's not simply that the quantity of communication is increasing, but the quality: we're communicating in more dynamic, more efficient, more useful, and more creative ways. This creativity and productivity is a result of a lot of factors which O'Reilly sums up in positively metaphysical-sounding terms:
If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
What kinds of principles are we talking about? Here are some novel ones O'Reilly pointed out (my paraphrasing):
- Cooperate, don't control: build loosely coupled systems that users can mix and match to create new value
- Users add value: the key to competitive advantage (this is a still a market oriented phenomenon) in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide.
- Trust your users - use their input and the "wisdom of crowds" to treat them as co-developers
Now, don't get me wrong - the whole idea of collective intelligence is neither new nor original. But remember the concept of technology as a precursor of human evolution. If what we're seeing is the computerized version of what is to become a more authentically integrated human consciousness, then that is truly significant. Is this yet another sign of the coming fourth density and the emergence of our social memory complex?
I don't mean to simply superimpose the quite interesting but unpopular idea of social memory on these trends. Believe what you want. But what fascinates me is the gap between individual and collective that is being filled by this phenomenon: it is society as a whole that is being technologically advanced in this instance. The individual's creativity, patterns of behavior, and consumption signature is not just being enhanced and broadened; there is a cumulative effect to these developing networks of interaction that is creating original and unique conceptual value. The task of Web2.0 is to program to these emerging opportunities - to provide a technological model for interactions that are being made possible. Whether something spiritual or metaphysical is happening or not is besides the point - something is happening and it's redefining the way we deal with one another, so far positively.
Today, it's sites like flickr, etsy, Google, Yahoo!, and the like that are providing inspiring ways to interact and creatively network. Tomorrow, the snowballing implications of these individually actualized social networks could have bigger implications. Politics suddenly benefits from a fundamentally more consciously interconnected electorate, through blogging and online forums and chats. Actions in the real world result from independently functioning cells working towards a more and more articulated collective goal. I already talked about how open source could provide a new model for social collaboration and self-interested activism. Most importantly, remember that these effects will necessarily be unpredictable - if I'm anywhere close to an accurate analysis of the dynamics at play, this will be about discovering latent abilities of the collective that transcends the atomic constituent individuals. In short, we can learn a lot about the potential of our people in the coming decades of connectivity.
Does this mean that Web2.0 is the training wheels for a collective consciousness - the social memory complex of Earth? I don't know, and I don't think we need to decide on exactly what it will be. It is what it is, and right now I'm content with having the closest thing to a collective consciousness we've ever had. I'm speculating on where it goes from here, and that doesn't necessarily require your belief in the metaphysical.
The important thing is to maximize participation and consciousness at the individual level so that the greatest possible collective phenomena can emerge. While the internet seems to be playing a huge role in the progression of human affairs, it is happening in other spheres as well. Indeed, the internet as we now know it is largely a result of a huge and unprecendented interplay between the formerly disparate human endeavors, manifested through a computer network. By keeping ourselves attentive, positive, and open to innovation and the resulting creative synergies, we will continue to manifest what could be the grandest stage of our evolution as a species.
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