A way to focus on lifes essence; The Gaian brain, the overview-effect and the need to network as an evolutionary necessity

This blog deals with the topic of what drives life itself and how social networking is and will be contributing to this purpose. Let us start with a little experiment:

At the end of this paragraph, please close your eyes and imagine, you (yes, you! ) are going to die. Within the next 3-5 Minutes. Make up your own scenario, maybe a car accident, an earth-quake, your heart stops beating... be creative. I know, it’s terrible. But it is crucial that you really try to do it. More important than the circumstances of your own death is to imagine what will happen to yourself within these moments. Maybe you start to ask yourself, if this YOU is really merly your mamal-body... Try to hold on to this thoughts as long as possible. A minute is already long, most people only make 30 seconds or so. If they are able to stand it at all. But you good-faith courageous blog readers can surly do it! Ready? OK, go!

Hey, welcome back. It feels quite good to be alive, doesn’t it?

You may ask „What does this have to do with social networking?“ I was very reluctant to publish that blog although the ideas have been in my mind since the last lesson with Rusty. Therefore I was very happy when I saw Florians blog, it deals with a related topic in a way: What is it, that drives life, that pushes evolution and, in the end, moves us people? Isn’t it just the will to survive?

You have still no connection to SN? Well, take a look, what made the most successfull species on earth (yes, that is us) so successfull. It is that organ in your head, our brain. Now, do you know how this amazing thing is organized?

Neurons in the brain - illustration

Credit: Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images

images@wellcome.ac.uk

Does this not look pretty much like a network?

Now, let us zoom out from this „our-brain-vision“ to a more global perspective. Some say, there is a kind of global brain forming in these days. The internet provides the missing link between all our brains, which then alltogether form a kind of „Gaian supermind“ Actually, bold visionairies did predict something similar already in the first half of this century. When I read through all this blog entries of my dear classmates, I hardly can find anything than support for this thesis.

Let us assume, this is true. By the way, I really liked Rustys very last slide in the lesson which stated:

„It is a collective hallicunation that will work if we want it to“

This quite nicely supports one of my all-time favorite core thesis: The title of Heinz von Försters book „Reality is the invention of a lier“:

Ok, but if we stick with this „Gaian-supermind-theory“ we could say that this super-entity, just became aware of itself. Those of us, who physically executed Gaias self-viewing-activity came back from space quite stunned. As a result from this experience, many became activits within environmental-saving organisations. This effect is called „the overview effect". A slight sense of that feeling is provided by this nice youtube video:

As a result of this self-awareness, the evolution of life is accelerating. It has been doing this throughout the ages, but now things are becoming really dynamic. Gaia has not only seen herself from space, she did also see that these humans, even though they are the latest and finest product of herself went a bit out of control. Some of them did forget what life is all about and started to heal their pain over this lack of joy with dumb consuming orgies. But this will be adjusted. I dare to say that as SN will reduce our level of privacy, this will also increase moral standards and decrease actions of pure greed or unsocial behaviour in general. After all: What are you doing with all your money if no one likes you any more?

Wraping all this up:

1. We are the outcome of the highest level of evolution, as such, we just became the senses, the eyes through which life (or the Gaian mind) is now whatching itself
2. We will not destroy the planet. On a „Gaian-timeframe“ we became aware of the impacts, that our activities have on the biosphere just some milliseconds ago. Life itself, as our little initial experiment just showed is programmed on survival - and so are we, so is the total organism. Response is already organising. We see the effects clearly in our daily life. Green technology companies are founded everywhere, every big company starts to market itself with „being green“, etc. Even if we have to learn still a lot, i.e. to reduce our energy and recource consumption, these lessons will be learned.
3. SNs will play a major part in this learning process. Because they are much more efficient than all forms of organisation we use up to now. At least when it comes to the topic of transport of knowledge and/or information. And we all know that these topics are nowadays the major part of „the value-.chain“. Just to come back a bit to our serious business topic in a way ;).

To give this little blog an interesting end, I hereby announce, that I will found a company right after (maybe during) my HHL studies. This company will deal with the way how energy is generated and used. It will be mainly organized as a social network although smaller parts of it will operate quite conventional.

The name will be

The Gaian Energies Network

and it will be quite successfull because it will make use of the power of social networks in order to solve problems and answer questions where big companies or even gouvernments fail to do so. For the benefit of us all, I mean: Life itself.

I hope you enjoyed reading

Love and peace

Jens aka Flash Goerdten

Some links related to the topics above:

• Web of life
• The global brain
• The overview effect
• Association of Space Explorers

Email - the next social network?

From time to time, I like to read the magazine "The Economist", a weekly news and international affairs publication from the United Kingdom. I read an interesting article, published at the beginning of this year. In the following, I want to share my personal findings with you. Enjoy!

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn are almost always related to the term “social networks” and most of us are more or less active members in such networks. "Social networking has become an ubiquitous feature of our online life – but does that mean it is also a business?" As an ongoing manager it is your duty to be interested in the facts behind the scenes. The article “Everywhere and nowhere”, published in March 2008 in The Economist gives a good insight in the business behind social networks and broadens one's mind to the networking power of the old-fashion things: emails. (cp. source 1.)

On the one hand, it is obvious that social networks equal business. We all know about the big deals in e-commerce business where Yahoo and Google acquired social network companies (cp. source 2.). In the majority of cases, they would not do that without having a clue of a revenue-generating business model behind. What does the business model look like? As often in business, two problems come together and become a win-win-situation. First, web-mail has certainly never become a big business. Second, the problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The user is “forced” to maintain separate accounts on separate networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing, blogging-sites, etc. Therefore, the company's value of social networks is limited to its borders. By combining web-mail and social networks they try to make the first more profitable and the second more open.

To be precisely and show you the possible effect on the further development of social networks: please, think about it for the moment. What personal information is available for both, email-providers and social networks? - Yes, the user's address books, in-boxes and calendars. It is the most important and valuable information. By combining web-mail and social networks, each provider is not only informed about the invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections, but also about the quality of these relationships. An email account offers valuable clues about the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. This combination results in a new kind of social intelligence which can be used to build many new services and a more open web. Nevertheless, the evidence of a profitable business behind still remained outstanding.

Assigning the final thought to future organizations. They also could use the same kind of social intelligence to use their existing email infrastructure to analyze and optimize their own “social networking assets”. The technology will not be the limiting factor, nessesary tools are already developed (cp. source 3.).

Sources:

1. “Everywhere and nowhere”, The Economist, May 2008 (please click)

2. “Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network”, The New York Times, Nov. 2007 (please click)

3.“Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place”, Techcrunch.com, Sept. 2007 (please click)