Your Consciousness + Global Connections = Human Evolution

My intention in this post is to collect my thoughts and raise your awareness.

For many of you more enlightened than I am, much of this may be old hat. If not, let’s do a thought mashup since I’ve been thinking about several things while seeking to understand the cultural and societal impacts of the next generation internet we’re experiencing:

• Your Consciousness
  • Social Software: People discuss this software in a Web 2.0-like context like it’s just cool ways to connect people. But it’s more than that…much more. Instead of a super-directory connecting people or allowing them to collaborate, what’s beginning to emerge are ways for people to find their own comfortable place to cluster with others that share an interest.

• • Participation Culture: This next phase of the internet is accelerating people’s participation. What makes this nextgen Web different than the first is blogging, vlogging, social spaces, search, tagging, The Long Tail, etc.

• • Trends in News Media. While it would’ve been helpful to obtain pure statistics on TV, radio and print media growth or share loss to online use, this was the only one I could find. Suffice to say our attention is increasingly going to online, on demand access to news and information. We’re our own filter and editor, though more of us are drowning in choices.

Where are you paying attention? What about those global connections and how the hell does this somehow equal human evolution Borsch?

• Global Connections
  • The reach of the internet now encompasses over 1 billion users. When Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat broke on to the  New York Times bestseller list (still there), its premise was, in large part, based on the reach of the global internet and the critical mass of these connections — and what they enabled.

I’ve personally experienced connections all over the world, most recently from Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. People only connected with me due to my blog and podcast, but it turns out we’re frighteningly alike (age, socioeconomic, propellerheads, lay scientists, seekers). Never would I have connected with them had it not been for the internet.

• Human Evolution
  • Though I could go off on tangents about the rise in enlightenment and global consciousness, I won’t since I’m fairly clueless about most of it right now. But I can see how connections to others, to knowledge, to systems and processes that will allow us to tap in to the opinions, recommendations and thoughts of others have already begun.
  • Most germane to evolution is the acceleration in bioscience that will allow us to modify our genetics and biology. Hacking our brains, changing our genes, extending our lives, creating new thoughts and new paradigms by connecting with others.

Don’t believe it? Then simply hang around Biology News Net and read articles like this one about silicon and neurons. Or this entire page about gene therapies and you’ll start to get a sense of the tiny and numerous breakthroughs occurring all over.

Literally everywhere I go now I’m running in to people that are seeking and searching for meaning. They’re done with the status quo, with consumerism, with multiple thousand year old explanations of origin that belie the knowledge we’ve gained since the original dogmas were written.

Just look around, open your eyes and you’ll see the rapid acceleration occurring in ALL fields now that fast, always on, broadband connections — and enabling software and Web applications — are connecting like minds to collaborate in ways we’ve never seen before and much faster as well.

Try this when you’re at your next social gathering and meet someone new: find out what they do for work. Ask them if the internet is changing anything about their business. Maybe it’s the way I ask or how I hear, but over-n-over again I hear people explaining how change is moving faster, their business models are being disrupted, and the old, familiar ways aren’t working so well anymore. They’re not exactly sure what’s changing sometimes, just that it is.

Regardless of your scientific, technological, religious or spiritual views, you must admit that we live in very interesting times.