The Global Brain

Image from: www.alwaysthetwain.com

The Global Brain Trust

We are part of a collective Brain Trust that now includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tumblr and StumbleUpon, among many other forms of daily use software. Our use of technology as a participatory archive for the human experience is unprecedented. Through these portals, we share personal, national and global news. It equalizes, universalizes and empowers.

We are active participants in an information revolution taking place at exponential speed. The changes are so rapid, and our willingness to adapt so keystroke fast, we are now hard-pressed to imagine a world without Google (1998), Wikipedia (2001), Facebook (2005), or YouTube (2006). How did we communicate prior to the arrival of these user-friendly technologies? And what does their fluent adaptability say about our collective need and desire to communicate, to influence, to participate, and to share? What impact does access to these tools have on our worldview, our sense of possibility?

The mega-speed of social media news streams matches our adaptability to new technologies. We are part of an information revolution without enough time to acknowledge and absorb the pace of the evolution. Messages, suggestions and imperatives course through the multi-leveled Internet airwaves as we influence our circles of friends and they influence us, making us powerful participants in news making.

As a Eureka invention, Web 2.0 has sparked a light bulb of idea-sharing with more people than any other time in history. While akin to the invention of the Guttenberg Press, radio, or television in communications breakthrough, the adaptability quotient has been remarkably fast. The difference is the speed with which it has been adopted. How many years did it historically take technologies to reach 50 million users? Radio? 38 years. Television? 13 years. Even the Internet took 4 years, and the iPod, 3 years. Facebook, on the other hand, added 100 million users in less than 9 months, while iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months. Exponential is an understatement.

The popularity of iPhones and Blackberrys now means that 80% of Twitter activity originates on handheld computer devices. In this way, we have become Human Sensors, reporting on the everyday, everywhere. What this means for citizen watchdogs transcends the Rodney King video phenomenon with a level of upload immediacy and instant broadcast previously unimaginable. For those in the Third World who never had access to landlines or laptops, cell phones are being used as data collectors and mini computers for transmission of important news, often reporting to global recipients what is censored in their own countries. The recent elections in Iran are just one example.

Despite the preponderance of reports on wars, disasaters, epidemics, murders, economic woes--- proliferated by traditional news media outlets, and the gossip tendencies of the tabloids, most people want to share good news. About themselves, their lives, about other people near and far, about leaders, do-gooders, comedians, artists, musicians, heroes and about solutions to the problems and puzzles of sustainability.

Social media and Web 2.0 have allowed millions of people to share their own brand of news, from funny YouTube videos to family photos to reviews of films, restaurants, as well as how-to activism for net neutrality, health care, environmental and social causes of all kinds.  People want to be in the Facebook, Stumble Upon hub for social reasons, but because there they find Hope, and info-endorphins in the form of laughter.

With unprecedented access to the Global Brain of information now provided by Wikipedia and Google searches and YouTube, we stand poised as a global civilization to plant seeds for the greater good at an unforeseen level.

Additional Reading: "Subtle Nudges for Social Good" by Alana Conner, Pop Tech, Stanford Center for Social Innnovation
Social Media’s True Impact on Haiti, China, and the World by Ben Parr, Mashable