Social Media - New Kid on the Evolutionary Block

Within any adaptive system there are considerable advantages to the development of information and communication (neural) networks between system components to enable the adaptive response and re-organization of the system.

If the Universe itself is an adaptive, responsive, system (as it seems to be) then Social Media should probably be understood as the new kid on the evolutionary block.

While still just infants now, social media platforms will mature to offer more highly aggregated content services and the streaming of an increasing amount of sensorial, neurological and positional data in real time. 

Eventually bionic sensory organs will even make it possible for people to literally see what others are seeing and hear what others are hearing in real time. If this seems too far-fetched to you for now, consider the fact that cochlear implants can already capture sound and directly stimulate cochlear nerves by electronic impulses (making it possible for persons with damaged hair cells on the ear’s basilar membrane to hear) and that implanted retinal devices enable light to enter micro-cameras, bypass damaged retinas and electronically stimulate optical nerves (enabling some blind persons to see).

 It doesn’t require a major conceptual leap to recognize that these electronic devices will one day record the sights and sounds they can sense and that these recordings could ultimately be relayed by micro-wireless transmitters, streamed to websites and shared with other people. Microsoft has already purchased the patent to transmit data using the human body - you can view the patent itself here. 

Humanity seems destined to benefit from increasingly reliable and replaceable bionic organs and if all the sensory information directed at a person is recorded and redirected towards a person’s social media page, then anyone accessing that person’s site will be able to take a real-time walk in that person’s virtual shoes. 

Hopefully all this sharing of "what's on our minds" will lead to greater empathy and understanding between us but an increasingly important issue to debate and address will be the degree to which users can personally control what information to stream and precisely when to stream it.  Privacy has already become the wild new frontier of social psychology with different social media behaviors currently being flame-tested for social acceptability.

While it may seem frightening at first, the gradual collapsing of the boundaries of self-consciousness and the progressive ease with which we will identify ourselves and others as parts of a collective body of consciousness are evolutionary processes in themselves and social media should be understood as the evolutionary development of new neural pathways in our systemic consciousness.