SoundFreak

I’ve been wondering something lately; as computer technology and the internet develop, are they impacting on our mentality and physiology in ways we didn’t envisage? Humans originally developed as a pack animal, designed to give their optimum performance in extended family groups of around 20, where each individual would have designated tasks, which were to some extent interchangeable because the group was small enough for everyone to know everything.

In today’s society, knowledge and information have become increasingly specialised in every field; there will never be another renaissance man like Leonardo Da Vinci who knows all the latest science, mathematics and art simultaneously… now we are more like the blind men who each know a different part of the elephant but none can describe the whole.

Perhaps as societies increase in size we are starting to resemble insect colonies where individuals have specialised tasks, eg. workers, nurses and soldiers as in an ant colony. This leads me on to the question of who or what takes the role of the ‘hive mind’, directing, linking and co-ordinating the drones? The only contender I can see is the internet, the web which links us all together in a global community.

The development of technology can be seen as the next stage of human evolution, so how long before this provokes physical and psychological changes in us as people. Just as the need to gather food and survive harsh conditions caused us to evolve to our present state, will we mutate further and develop a shared consciousness now that we all spend so much time logged on to a global network?