Thoughts on Chardin's Presumed Evolution of Human Consciousness: Part 2

Humans are increasingly integrating the Internet into their daily lives. Once a sign of wealth and status held by inhabitants of first world countries, access to the Internet is fast becoming seen as a necessity, if not a right, for all humans. I believe this phenomenon is occurring for two reasons. Firstly, it is becoming harder for people to effectively establish a livelihood for themselves without interacting with the Internet. Secondly, the Internet is increasingly being utilized to do two things: gather information and disperse knowledge. Both reasons are of vital importance and warrant examination.

Consider two propositions. Most Americans use the Internet; most Americans rely on the Internet in some way for some thing or reason. Neither proposition should be seen as controversial. Now consider a third proposition: most Americans rely on the Internet in some way for their job. More precisely, most individuals rely on the Internet in some way to most effectively and efficiently perform their job. Should this last proposition be true, it contains an important insight into how Humans are becoming more reliant on the Internet.

From the local baker who utilizes the Internet to make her own website and market her business to online customers, to the large multinational corporation that uses the Internet to process customer orders from around the world, the Internet is now used by almost every business. But why is it that the Internet has become so crucial for modern business(es) to function? Shifting our attention to the last proposition from above, I believe it is because it is true that the Internet allows individuals, and transitively ones business(es), to work most effectively and most efficiently.

All other things being equal, as a reality of free-market economic principles, businesses that are not competitive will not survive. Thus, noncompetitive businesses cannot provide for their employees' livelihoods. The Internet is the modern tool which enables competition, and businesses are better suited to accomplish their jobs by using the Internet than they would be without it. They are more effective in carrying out their tasks, and those that do not to use it will succumb to those that do. It is in each businesses' best interest to do what allows them to most effectively do their job and the Internet is what allows them to do this.

Take the local baker; she could certainly operate without a website, but if she did, she would lose out on valuable marketing potential. It would be harder for her to reach customers, and it would also be harder for customers to find her, as only individuals who can physically come to her business would be able to become customers. With the Internet, the baker can provide information about her business to more people and broaden her clientele base. Furthermore, she could receive orders without her customers having to be in the store. Similarly, the multinational corporation uses the Internet for advertising, and it may also use the Internet to act as a virtual storefront from which orders can be received for its products. It can reach more customers, fulfill their orders, and maintain their information for future transactions.

Though clearly the Internet is a vital tool for business, its functionality for Humanity goes far beyond that of economic necessity; as was hinted at above, how information combines with the Internet is also of vital importance.

The Internet has emerged as the best way to gather information and disperse knowledge. We use it to google recipes and to help diagnose potentially life-threatening diseases. We use it to find information, then we share that information with others. Humanity has created (perhaps) the ultimate tool that can be utilized to connect individuals with the resources and information that they are looking for. Furthermore, it is allowing humans to increasingly connect with each other. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, so increases the connections formed between individuals. Professional connections through career services and communications, romantic connections through dating applications, and personal connections through shared gaming adventures are all becoming more common.

In addition, the sheer amount of knowledge that the Internet now houses is increasingly beyond our comprehension. As of 2011, scientists have measured that we have stored over 295 exabytes of information. To put that quantity of data in perspective, that is 295 billion gigabytes. The amount of traffic that the Internet is seeing is also increasing and is expected to continue increasing. As per a 2016 Cisco white paper, annual IP traffic across the globe will reach 2.3 zettabytes by the year 2020; 2.3 zettabytes is equal to 2300 exabytes, or 2,300 billion gigabytes.

As access to the Internet becomes more widespread, our individual reliance on it will only increase. As illustrated above, the Internet is now a vital part of global economic activity and personal utility. We use it for gaining and storing knowledge both for work and during our leisure time. It is because of these facts that the Internet is increasingly being seen as a necessity—if not a right—for all peoples.

Before moving forward, let me review. I have illustrated the extent to which the Internet has become a vitally important part of modern humanity's life. The questions now is how this understanding may connect with the notion of an emerging Noosphere. In my mind, the connection is obvious; our increasingly Internet-focused culture is acting as catalyst for an emerging cultural Noosphere-ic conception.

We may not have a conception of a Noosphere as articulated by Chardin. But it seems to me that we are already in the process of forming (perhaps we have already moved to accepting?) a conception of a Noosphere, though a Noosphere of a seemingly different constitution than what Chardin may have expected.

Psychic infolding, as we may experience it, is being actualized in the bits and bytes of computational memory and not in human grey matter. The use of the Internet and human reliance on it signals not an enlarging of our minds as such, but an outsourcing of our mental processes to a technological holding-bin that can be drawn from when the need arises. Certainly, the Internet is not conscious, but we do bring our consciousness-es to it. We focus our mental energies on using this resource, and it acts as an extension of our own cognitive powers. Furthermore, it also evolves and changes based on how we use it and what we put into it. This ability to change and grow more complex is part of our own consciousness and can be seen when we learn something new. As such, why should we not consider the Internet in the same vein as an individual's consciousness?

To be clear, I am not saying that the Internet is the Noosphere. Neither am I asserting that the Internet is conscious or that the Internet is a consciousness. Yet I believe our global Internet-culture may well be actively—though inconspicuously—moving individuals towards ultimately forming and accepting the conception of a Noosphere. 

In my next post, I will look more specifically about a development of the post-Internet age: artificial intelligence (AI). I will then examine how this new field could signal a paradigm shift in societal notion of some united human consciousness.