Internet elevator heads for higher consciousness

A lot of what we see going on in the social web reflects the pyramid climbing first articulated by psychologist Abraham Maslow as a “hierarchy of needs”.

The essence of Maslow’s theory is that humans must satisfy certain needs before they can go to the next level. We need to be able to breathe before we think about safety. We need to feel safe before we can think about belonging. We need to belong before we can think about making our mark. And we need to get through that before we are free to achieve our true potential; Maslow referred to this final level as self-actualisation.

Using Maslow’s model, we can say that software used to sit at the second level. The arrival of the internet meant that “belonging” could be addressed.

Recently, we’ve seen an explosion of people trying to make their mark: bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers, podcasters, videocasters and so on are all blasting away.

No doubt the top level has been reached by a minority who have dumped their egos and gone for self-actualisation.

By coincidence, Kaila Colbin of VortexDNA has blogged (blog.vortex
dna.com) about mapping the internet onto the Maslow hierarchy (see the IWR blog, 18 January, and Letters, this page).

Colbin has a different and interesting take on the subject. She believes the internet is working its way up the levels, carrying its users with it until, at the topmost level, the internet will become more or less invisible as (some) users self-actualise like fury. My words, not hers.

One commenter on her blog, Raf from the Sustento Institute, wondered whether the internet could be the gateway to “a higher level of personal and global consciousness”. Now there’s a thought.

Many years ago, I offended some people in Mensa by suggesting that their intelligence was possibly just a kind of flap in their brain which was more open than others’ to a universal consciousness. You could hear the hiss of deflating egos.

But if the web does evolve further, then it could indeed become a repository for everything. And our access could be mediated by matching our profile with that of the material we’re seeking. That’s assuming we have the access rights, of course.

Let’s go back to Colbin’s hierarchy of needs for the internet. Her levels are: existence, connectivity, organisation, semantic and actualisation.

Computers, the network and documents have to exist first. Sure, connections are made at that first level, but they don’t contain much real meaning.

Linking up
The connectivity that Colbin refers to is the ability to connect from within documents. The link defines a relationship. She says: “The difference between levels 1 and 2 is the difference between a collection of hardware and a natural system.”

Once that insight is understood, the rest of the stack falls into place. Organisation is about finding the right stuff easily. We do this currently by analysing and applying value to the links in association with traditional indexing. We’ve been at this level for years and will continue here for a while. “From a bucket of data we can pour a glass of connections,” as blog commenter Brian Hayes put it. Nice.

So now we start to plunge into the unknown. Semantics comes next: deriving meaning from the content. Colbin describes the previous step and this one as “the difference between a horse and a car”. She can’t predict how it will happen. But when it does, she believes that “our focus will return to the true meaning of what we’re doing.”

Can't wait

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