The Digital World Consciousness

The mind is a wonderful thing, but what is the potential extent of that wonder?

In recent weeks, I have been reading a number of books that relate to the question of world networking. For instance, I read the book Linked by Albert Laszlo Barabasi of the University of Notre Dame. It describes the power of networks in every aspect of life, from microbiology to computer networks to social networks of people. What was particularly striking about this book was the point that networks make it possible for any two nodes to relate to each other through a relatively short path. For instance, let's say I wanted the autograph of my favorite baseball player, Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals. Assuming I don't already know him, how would I go about doing that?

First, I would need to think of one person I do know who most likely could lead me to my destination (Pujols). I would think of my friend Terry, who works in the sports department for the Toronto Sun. He probably doesn't know Pujols, but he would at least know a senior sports writer for the Blue Jays, who in turn would know a sports writer for the St. Louis Cardinals. That person would know Pujols, and in theory could ask for his autograph on my behalf. That's four degrees of separation, or put another way, Albert Pujols is only four people removed from becoming my acquaintance.

The point is that networking allows for close connectedness to the world all around us. The Internet and the World Wide Web are obviously important here, which brings me to another book that I have just begun reading, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. This is an anthology of essays written by people over the past century or more about the power of multimedia to free the imagination and creativity of the human mind.

Without having read much of the book, I can already see where this is leading. The concept of hyper-linking, as we experience when we surf the Internet somewhat randomly by clicking links, is that we create our own experience of the world. We collect information in a manner that we choose, process it in our unique ways, and sometimes we put our new thoughts back out onto the Web for others to digest. In fact, that is what I am doing now with this blog, contributing my own unique thought processes back into cyberspace, where potentially anyone else in the world (because of the Internet) can read what I have to say.

Just imagine what that means for the collective consciousness of mankind. Basically, we are moving to a point where we could be sharing the mind-processing power of billions of human brains toward creative solutions of our problems. As Marshall McLuhan stated in Understanding Media, "after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned."

So where are we heading? This is the question that interests me and drives me toward my future study and research goals in the field of multimedia. Basically, I see a number of things happening that are shaping the digital world consciousness, as I like to call it.

First, the World Wide Web is growing exponentially, so man's collective mind is being made available for all to witness. Potentially scary, yes, so we have to be careful about what we put out in cyberspace for others to read. For the moment, though, let's say that we have the ability to publish our thoughts for the world to read if we so choose.

But all that information is simply overwhelming to process. This is where the second component of the digital world consciousness comes into play - search engines. The number one search technology today is obviously Google. They are doing the best job, although still incomplete, of indexing the World Wide Web (and, thus, the thoughts of people).

Next is making that information accessible anywhere, anytime. People are not always at their computers, but increasingly they are staying connected through the use of portable devices, such as cell phones, PDAs, and media devices such as iPods. Wireless and satellite technologies are allowing people with these devices to access and even upload information from anywhere. Google's efforts to blanket entire cities with wi-fi access show how the time is coming when we can literally be connected to the digital world consciousness at all times.

An interesting, ongoing project on the World Wide Web is the Wikipedia project. It is an effort to obtain the largest known collection of human knowledge by allowing anyone and everyone to contribute articles. Already, the size and scope of Wikipedia greatly surpasses that of any conventional encyclopedia. And it keeps growing, everyday.

Even as these developments take place, they will repeat themselves in greater, more meaningful forms as multimedia applications become more sophisticated. Virtual reality is an idea whose time is arriving, but its potential has not yet been realized. Once virtual worlds become ubiquitous, we are going to see a whole new stage of human mind processing.

Our world is growing ever smaller, yet the potential for creativity and thought interaction grows at a pace that is hard to conceive. We do live in a globalized world, and we are much more closely connected to each other than we ever dreamed of. The digital world consciousness is, I believe, where we are heading. Although we must be careful about how we exploit this capability (surely that is a field that must grow along side the development of multimedia technology), the potential for combining the brain power of all the Earth's people is a marvelous thing to contemplate.