From Local Villages to Collective Consciousness
From our progression from local villages to global villages, digital archipelagos, soliptical spheres and beyond, here is a chart of the evolving nature of society, communication, and media.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
― William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Tens of thousands of years ago, all of our communication was direct and personal. This was the time of campfires, town squares and close-knit societies. With the dawn of the radio and television, we have since shifted life into a global village. A civilization heralded by a ceaseless stream of information. The invention of mass media like newspapers, radio, and television in the 20th century transformed communication drastically. These technologies enabled information to reach massive audiences simultaneously, creating a sense of shared experience and global awareness. Black and white TVs were tuned to the same news program in living rooms across the country or even the world. The anxieties of a rural teenager in Africa became the same as an elderly woman in a metropolis in America. Their exposure to the same media shaped their worldviews in similar ways, pushing and pulling them in the same directions.
With social media creating more intimate, visual and diverse, there is yet another other impeding change lurking beyond McLuhan’s convention of the ‘global village’. For a deeper look into his work, you can check two previous letters I wrote about AI and modern media as an extension of mankind.
Looking at the media of today compared to that of the pre-90s, the asymmetry between creator and consumer has been broken. Previously, the link was one way. Now the interactive element is becoming more prominent with the likes of TikTok, which has over a billion users and doesn’t appear to be slowing down. In the next decade, half the population may be using it, or else something virtually identical. Though, given the possible ban on TikTok and competition from alternative platforms, it may be that the trajectory of social media takes place over even more shattered platforms than before. Regardless, the main change is the distinction between consumer and creator in modern media.
We are no longer residents absorbing information; we are architects shaping the digital landscape through our content creation and curation. The power dynamics have shifted. It’s as if each of us has been given an island, where we construct the environment from our desires and attract people who are suited to it. The global village has heralded a civilization forever bombarded by the information. Since then, the maelstrom of anxiety has accumulated. The young have been forced into an never-ending dopamine-seeking cycle. Our attention is essentially sucked out of our heads by these tiny screens. The global village has gotten rowdy, and as a result, each of us has stuck our heads into a hand-picked selection of sources. Cultural phenomena across electronic media used to boast viewings that dwarf those of today. Take MAS*H, Cheers and Seinfeld, each with nearly eighty million viewers for the shows’ finale. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones, despite being a superpopular show at the time of its finale, garnered only twenty million viewers. All of this is despite people spending more time watching shows, having access to the content via services like Netflix. It’s worth mentioning that factors like piracy or events (e.g informal viewings) might be giving a lower estimate of the viewership, but the fact remains that today, we simply watch different shows to one another. The viewership of these shows, regardless of the platform they are on, typically consists of millions of viewers, but there is rarely significant overlap between the viewing groups. Let’s jump into a rather striking example. Have you heard of the Amazing Digital Circus? Probably not. If you ask all of your friends and family if they have, they probably haven’t either. It’s a newly released animated video from a channel on YouTube, and garnered one hundred million views in less than a month and now has over three hundred million views. It’s no longer the same experience the older generations had, where everyone would be talking about and watching the exact same show. The presence of myriad streaming platforms, social media channels, and content recommendation algorithms have increasingly balkanized these viewership groups,
Taking McLuhan's "global village" as an analogy for a world interconnected and homogenized by television, the current digital media landscape could be likened to a "digital archipelago”. That’s a coinage of mine. The internet has created countless isolated islands of thought and interest. Just as islands in an archipelago are separate yet part of a larger whole, digital communities are also fragmented and often insular, yet existing within the broader context of the global internet. The internet ushered in the era of online communities and forums. This also brought in compartmentalization and echo chambers that often characterize today's online experience. Communities became a silo where facts are often bent or ignored to fit the prevailing narrative. This lack of interconnected discourse leads to the proliferation of misinformation. As a result, there are fewer opportunities for challenging ideas and verifying facts across groups. Such a spread resembles a complex contagion process. Although there is already a fairly scattered populace across these isles, the next phase is even more solitary.
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it… The constant background presence of these products…does not require active attention…It becomes difficult to imagine modern life otherwise
― M Weiser
Moving away from the village or island analogy, something more abstract can be considered to represent the next stage in our media consumption. Each person's “soliptical sphere" represents a bubble, where they receive information tailored to their personal views and preferences. This is a highly personalized but isolated experience. We're already moving into this age of hyper-personalization, where algorithms curate content feeds and recommendations based on individual preferences. AI is supercharging this process, by reducing the number of actual humans involved in producing the content. The move from “digital archipelago” to the “soliptical sphere” is a smooth one: it’s a simply a digital archipelago where there is no actual creator behind the media consumed. Also, where the media we devour is ours and ours alone. This “soliptical sphere” also brings a vicious cycle of self-reinforcement. Consider how AI-generated media has flooded the Internet, meaning the next round of AI training will capture the noisy and low quality generations from earlier AI models. Or, in terms of our own brains and capabilities changing, as markets adopt more AI-generated media, so too does our tolerance for quality drop. Whether from AI-generated text, art or just cost-cutting decision-making, there is a serious risk that modern media will be saturated with lower and lower quality. Until all that’s left is a civilization of simulacra.
The “soliptical sphere” raises all sorts of interesting philosophical questions and implications, which brings us to the next stage that I call the “neural nexus”. In some ways, this stage is also a direct response to the problems identified with the “soliptical sphere” phase. At some point, we will want to connect with each other as human beings once again, but our technology would have evolved by then too. This is in line with growing trends across AI and neuroscience- media and technology integrating directly with human cognition. This future holds the possibility of direct brain-machine interaction, bypassing the limitations of screens and devices. Immersive virtual reality experiences, telepathic communication, and augmented reality all seamlessly blended together. This could even enable us to have direct mind-to-mind communication. Such issues of privacy, identity, and the nature of human interaction. are unsolved. Society could see a redefinition of shared experiences, with the potential for both deeper understanding and greater division based on access to and control of such technology. Our rights and protections are also in more jeopardy here, where a institution or government could quite literally install thought policing, political targeting and all manner of other nightmarish scenarios sci-fi writers have been pointing out for hundreds of years already.
Language as the technology of human extension, whose of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of "weightlessness," that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man (1964)
From villages to islands, spheres and nexuses, what might the end point look like? While the future is uncertain (as is the past and present), there may yet be a something of a final phase: a “conscious convergence". The development of communication technologies has always been driven by a desire to overcome the limitations of space and time. A paradigm shift towards a collective consciousness could lead to individual thoughts and experiences being part of a shared cognitive network. Communication could become instantaneous and non-verbal, transcending language barriers, as well as emotional, neurological and cultural differences. The concept of individual privacy needs to be redefined as thoughts and experiences become more openly accessible. Soon, everything from our thoughts to our DNA may be in the cloud. Traditional media as we know it could become obsolete, replaced by shared experiences and collective storytelling. Content creation and consumption might be an instantaneous, communal process, with blurred lines between creators and consumers. This hypothetical stage would represent a profound transformation in human interaction, potentially unifying diverse perspectives into a singular, shared experience but also raising significant ethical, privacy, and identity concerns. The shift away from the “soliptical sphere” is where everyone leaves their own spheres to become part of a shared one or else all of the spheres combine together.
These stages are not necessarily linear, and elements of each can coexist. Different parts of the world are at different levels of technological sophistication, so while some may be basking in “digital archipelagos”, or stuck in a “solipitical sphere”, others may be engaged in a kind of “local global village”, where essentially a random subset of the population shares the same information but doesn’t engage with the Internet or AI in the same way we do. Even while Internet echo chambers and AI continue to clammer on into our daily lives, many of us are moving away from it and are instead seeking to create the present and grounded life we had access to before the rise of electronic media.