November 06 2007

Text By Greg Fallis

It began with the printing press: a mechanical tool for reproducing and widely distributing thoughts and ideas. The telegraph and telephone sped it along. Cinema added images to the mix, and with radio came voices. The emergence of the internet transformed it and refocused it. But it was television that was the breakthrough.

It reaches almost everybody in industrial and information-based societies, without distinction to social class. It depicts behavior as behavior, without any filtering by language. It has both an immediate effect and a lasting effect, yet the images are transient and impermanent. People are exposed to more information more quickly, with less need for actual participation and without any demand that the information be processed or even remembered.

In 1893 Emile Durkheim coined the term "collective consciousness." Seventeen years later, in 1910, Carl Jung began referring to the "collective unconscious." By 1930 the notion of a "hive mind" appeared in a science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon. All of those concepts refer to many minds holding and sharing a common set of beliefs, ideas, attitudes and thoughts at the same time, without any need to interact.

Television: one small step for technology, one giant leap toward the hive mind.