Functional Collective Conscious Coming Into View (Updated)
Monday, August 3, 2009
The realization of a functional collective conscious is the ultimate outcome of ubiquitous digital communications. Our collective conscious refers to the things we all know, i.e. shared cultural knowledge, beliefs, morals, etc. A functional collective conscious refers to the new wealth of shared knowledge enabled by ubiquitous and instantaneous access to the internet. We are steadily moving towards a reality in which as soon as one person gains a piece of information, every human on Earth gains that piece of information. We will have the ability to access any information at will, and that function will be so quick and effortless as to be effectively the same as possessing the knowledge in our own brains.
Each year since I started writing about this back in 2007 (here here here here), this theoretical existence becomes a little less theoretical. There are a few recent developments that I see as pieces of the puzzle.
Status Updates
How many people do you know who are not posting status updates somewhere on the web these days? At the beginning of this year, a PEW study showed that the behavior of posting brief status updates is on the rise. As of December 2008 "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." That was up from 9% only one month before, and 6% back in May of 2008. Since then, Twitter has grown at a staggering pace month after month. Most recently, Compete estimates 23 Million unique visitors in June.
And now that status updates have become a normal part of Facebook and many other social network environments, the practice of continuously broadcasting both personal and public information that is important to us and our network is becoming a normal way of living.
Intelligent Location
Have you heard about Foursquare, yet: Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services and Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter. If you're predisposed to cynicism, you may skeptical of this new location-aware social mobile apps significance. After all, haven't we seen this before with Dodgeball, Brightkite, and Loopt? Well, none of them caught on like Foursquare has. And everyone I've seen use it is getting hooked on broadcasting their location and useful information about that place. They receive push notifications alerting them of a great new bar to check out around the corner from the cafe they're eating at or telling them to order the Six Point IPA because it's the best beer in the city.
Asking your local friends for recommendations in the neighborhood is nothing new. But, tools like Foursquare are creating a new level of pervasive access to that information.
Always Be Sharing
Have you found yourself visiting Tumblr or Posterous more often recently? These super simple blogging platforms have proven that they have a unique purpose on the web. They are here to help us deal with this modern dilemma: "I'm drowning in interesting information, and I want to do something useful with it." People share all kinds of stuff on these sites, design, photography, articles, quotes, commentary. But essentially they are a simple faucet of things found on the web filtered through the personal interests of one user.
We seem to be moving towards a way of living in which we feel obligated to share all information that we think would be relevant to our network. If our network is always listening, then we're always going to be asking ourselves "What do I have to tell them?"
Click for full size image
Do you agree? Have you found this to be the case in your own digital life?
Update: New statistics on Tumblr's popularity and growth are very impressive.
Each year since I started writing about this back in 2007 (here here here here), this theoretical existence becomes a little less theoretical. There are a few recent developments that I see as pieces of the puzzle.
Status Updates
How many people do you know who are not posting status updates somewhere on the web these days? At the beginning of this year, a PEW study showed that the behavior of posting brief status updates is on the rise. As of December 2008 "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." That was up from 9% only one month before, and 6% back in May of 2008. Since then, Twitter has grown at a staggering pace month after month. Most recently, Compete estimates 23 Million unique visitors in June.
And now that status updates have become a normal part of Facebook and many other social network environments, the practice of continuously broadcasting both personal and public information that is important to us and our network is becoming a normal way of living.
Intelligent Location
Have you heard about Foursquare, yet: Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services and Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter. If you're predisposed to cynicism, you may skeptical of this new location-aware social mobile apps significance. After all, haven't we seen this before with Dodgeball, Brightkite, and Loopt? Well, none of them caught on like Foursquare has. And everyone I've seen use it is getting hooked on broadcasting their location and useful information about that place. They receive push notifications alerting them of a great new bar to check out around the corner from the cafe they're eating at or telling them to order the Six Point IPA because it's the best beer in the city.
Asking your local friends for recommendations in the neighborhood is nothing new. But, tools like Foursquare are creating a new level of pervasive access to that information.
Always Be Sharing
Have you found yourself visiting Tumblr or Posterous more often recently? These super simple blogging platforms have proven that they have a unique purpose on the web. They are here to help us deal with this modern dilemma: "I'm drowning in interesting information, and I want to do something useful with it." People share all kinds of stuff on these sites, design, photography, articles, quotes, commentary. But essentially they are a simple faucet of things found on the web filtered through the personal interests of one user.
We seem to be moving towards a way of living in which we feel obligated to share all information that we think would be relevant to our network. If our network is always listening, then we're always going to be asking ourselves "What do I have to tell them?"
Do you agree? Have you found this to be the case in your own digital life?
Update: New statistics on Tumblr's popularity and growth are very impressive.
4 Comments:
Fantastic post, Mike. What I wonder is how this will affect the way in which we consume information. For example, as a person who has been spending 8+ hours a day online for the past 10 years, I find myself reading less and scanning more. For me, sometimes it feels like consuming the information is less important than knowing it's out there and knowing how to retrieve it when I need it. I wonder overall how the shared digital collective will change how people learn and process information. I can already imagine it's having huge effects on literacy (we spend much more of our time reading now than we used to, due to our interaction with technology). Great stuff.
Yes, but why is foursquare so popular while Google's "Latitude" isn't (even though it allows location transmission without even requiring any action by the user?). And: Are we just going to move from fad to fad, or will there be a clear trend and consolidation soon?
In gauging your response, you should probably take into account the early adopter status of your readers.
So while we will all answer "yes" to your questions/observations (as I suspect you realizel) if I posed the questions to my Facebook friends, most of them will answer no and be more familiar with FourSquare as a board game than a location-announcing app.
Point being that while some of our behavior will be adopted by the mainstream, much of it won't, and when it is adopted it may be in a very different form.
Very interesting post and true. And I wonder for a long time now, why do we only see the need of sharing user generated content on the internet and not in public spaces? Why don't we see things like YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Twitter (but transformed into non-digital applications) etc. in bars, libraries, parks, urban planning? Why don't we see the needs and habits of digital life and the fulfilling of these needs outside the digital life?
Is it an artificially created and temporarily need or is it a real need?
Post a Comment
<< Home