Changing Notions of Identity in an Increasingly Connected World

In my last post, I asked "Who are we now?" when we're connected all the time. This is a question a lot of people are thinking about, perhaps none more so than science writer Michael Chorost, in his 2011 book World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet. In this wide-ranging study, he examines how the opportunity for increasingly dense connection with others provided to us through the Internet is radically changing our notions of self. As our technology progresses, we will become even more intimately connected with others, with a futuristic version of our now hand-held devices possibly moving inside our brains, providing us with a world of connection to others only psychics could once dream of.

     But what will this mean for who we are? How we have always perceived of ourselves as individuals? It looks as those this concept is in for a radical overhaul as we come to accept that we are more a part of a "hive mind" rather than disconnected beings.

     Chorost cites the work of Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, and James H. Fowler, PhD, who, in their book, Connected: How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, show that we are already profoundly connected with others in far-reaching ways we can barely understand.

      Chorost quotes Christakis and Fowler (p. 116) as saying, "A smoker may have as much control over quitting as a bird has to stop a flock from flying in a particular direction," because of who we are connected to through our far-flung social networks -- connections, in many cases, to people we don't even know exist. True autonomy, maintains Chorost, has always been an illusion. He believes the World Wide Mind will only make this fact more obvious (p. 202).

     As we become more integrated with the Internet, Chorost posits that our concept of individuality itself will have to be radically reconfigured. He writes, "Once assumed to reside in a single human body, a personality may become distributed over multiple bodies. Most of it will reside within an individual body, but not all of it" (pp. 201-202).

       Time magazine writer, Lev Grossman, hypothesizes in his Feb. 10, 2011, article, "2045: The year man becomes immortal", that we might "scan our consciousness into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually" (p. 44). And, he then asks, "If I scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me?" (p. 48).

     Grossman goes on to say that this is an idea that's "radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailng to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Grossman then asks, "Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead?" (p. 48). Who knows what possibilities exist for us?

     But exist they do and the futures of those who follow us will look very different from our own. Chorost quotes author Joel Garreau from his book Radical Evolution, when he writes, "Can we picture devotions marking the great significance of a young person getting her first cognition piercing -- awakening her mind directly to the Web of all meaning?" (Garreau, p. 265, in Chorost, p. 138).

     What we see now is only the beginning.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utNHl6AQqTA