The Internet as Omnipresence

In a previous post (“Congregationality, Crossroadsivity, and the Internet”), I wrote about the collapse of the divide between congregation points and crossroads as a result of the Digital Revolution and the emergence of the Internet. In this post, I would like to explore some of the underpinnings and wider implications of that collapse.

The collapse of the divide between congregationality and crossroadsivity is in reality a surface manifestation of a deeper, more fundamental collapse, the collapse of physical space brought about by the Digital Revolution. By locating human activity primarily in virtual space, the Digtal Revolution has rendered physical (that is, geographical) space largely irrelevant, especially for cultural evolution. Prior to the Digital Revolution, geographical location, geographical remoteness, and geographical isolation were major constraints upon cultural evolution. Matt Ridley (in a TED Talk) offers the example of Tasmania, which was cut off from the Australian mainland by a dramatic rise in sea level several thousand years ago. The result was cultural regression rather than cultural evolution on the island of Tasmania. Culture on Tasmania devolved, Ridley explains, partly because there was no cultural exchange between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. The Tasmanians did not have the sea-faring “technology” that would enable them to cross the strait between the two land masses, and this effectively placed them in geographical isolation. With the introduction of virtual space, however, physical remoteness or geographical isolation becomes immaterial to cultural exchange or any other memetic activity for that matter.

Virtual space is, paradoxically, “spaceless” and infinite. That is to say, it has zero dimensions. It collapses the three-dimensionality of physical space into non-dimensionality. Virtual space cannot be described in the language of Cartesian coordinates, precisely because of its virtuality, its lack of extension in physical space. It might be said that the “digitization of culture” did for space what Einstein did for time, but in reverse. While the “Relativity Revolution” put dimensionality into time (by showing that time is “the fourth dimension” and is therefore part of a “space-time continuum”), the Digital Revolution took the dimensionality out of space and released the very concept of space itself from its moorings in the realm of physicality.

The collapse of the traditional concept of space as being fundamentally dimensional has serious implications for the notion of presence. Traditionally, to be present is to be located in a given place (identifiable by Cartesian coordinates) at a given time. A body cannot occupy two or more distinct locations at any given point in time. This is the essence of presence. However, if space is non-dimensional, as it is in the case of virtual space, then the “extensionality” (used here in a non-technical sense) of space vanishes, and with it, presence evaporates. Either that, or presence becomes omnipresence, since in virtual space, here is everywhere and everywhere is here, and one can consequently be everywhere now. Thus, the Digital Revolution has bestowed upon humans that rare attribute once reserved exclusively for the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian God: omnipresence. Through the Internet (and related technologies), every human on the planet has the possibility of being present in every location on the globe at every single instant of time. It is true that the reach of the Internet is not quite universal, and there are portions of the globe that are not yet accessible through the Internet. Nevertheless, in theory such a universal, unbounded presence is possible—and it is important to note that it is not merely a theoretical, “virtual” (imaginary) sort of omnipresence, but an actual presence, since virtual space maps directly onto physical space in the world of the Internet. An interesting incident that occurred a few years ago illustrates this point beautifully. It is the story of someone in the Philippines saving the life of a California woman who had a heart attack in her home in California. The person in the Philippines was watching the California woman’s webcam camcast and noticed her collapse suddenly on camera. When no one came to her aid, he realized that she was alone at home and called the local police in the Philippines. They contacted the local police in California who arranged to have an ambulance dispatched to the woman’s house, and her life was thus saved. All of this happened in a matter of minutes. So, for all practical purposes, the person in the Philippines was actually present in the room with the California woman. Other, more general examples can be cited, such as telesurgery (or "remote surgery"), in which surgeons operate on patients hundreds or even thousands of miles removed from where they are by means of computer-controlled robots.

This suggests that we now need to revise our definition of the word “presence.” No longer can it be restricted to being present “in the body.” Presence is now much more than just the state of “being there” as traditionally understood. In the case of the California woman whose life was saved, the consciousness of the person in the Philippines was present in her room, even though his body was thousands of miles away. Thus, we now have a separation between the bodies of individuals and the consciousness associated with those bodies. The Digital Revolution has made it possible for individual consciousness to extend far beyond the narrow limits set by the bodies of the individuals in question. To understand this notion of extension, we might invoke that well-worn anthropological insight that tools are an extension of the hand. The idea here is that the human hand in limited in what it can do, but tools help us to transcend that limitation and extend the hand’s capabilities. Tool and hand become parts of one single continuum, and it is difficult to determine precisely where hand ends and tool begins, at least as far as function goes. This extending function is, of course, common to all technology (here understood in its broadest sense). Technology as such is, by definition, directed towards transcending human limitations, whether physical or otherwise. Having established this extending function of technology, it is now possible to demonstrate that digital technology, and in particular the Internet, with its entourage of communications devices such as smart phones and iPads and so on, fulfill an extending function. The question is: What exactly do these technologies and their related devices extend? As the example of the California woman shows, they extend human presence. But they do more than merely extend our presence beyond our bodies: they make that extension absolute, that is, they carry it to the nth degree, to the point where no further extension is possible, to the point of omnipresence.

Our presence was once limited to our physical bodies. We laboured long under this limitation, and were greatly hampered by it—and in our thinking we are perhaps still haunted by its ghost. Our language is riddled with the rhetoric of physical, geographical limitation. We speak of “being at the right place at the right time.” And it was once fashionable in intellectual circles to claim that “Geography is Destiny.” Not any more—now that the Digital Revolution has released human consciousness from its moorings in the human body and set it free to wander at will among the vast and boundless regions of virtual space. The omnipresence possible in virtual space renders physical, geographical space practically irrelevant in our lives. This is why geographical congregation points and geographical crossroads don’t matter any more for cultural evolution.

The omnipresence conferred by the Digital Revolution is of a very different sort from the omnipresence that George Orwell, in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, feared technology would afford to the totalitarian state. In the novel, this state-controlled omnipresence takes the form of the All-Seeing Eye of “Big Brother,” who is constantly watching everything everywhere by means of ubiquitous television cameras—a perhaps none-too-subtle allusion to the All-Seeing Eye of God, under whose penetrating gaze F. Scott-Fitzgerald’s characters also quaked as they passed through the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. This intimidating sort of omnipresence is intended to keep humans in line, to prevent them from going beyond the bounds of arbitrarily set limits—whether set by the state or by religious authorities. By contrast, the omnipresence of virtual space is “democratic” and liberating. It is available (at least in theory) to all (in India, even slum dwellers have cell phones, according to Ridley), and it strips away all boundaries except those that might be set by personal choice.

This is a major advance in cultural evolution. It is a great leap forward, in the order of the leap that occurred with the “discovery” of agriculture and later with the introduction of movable type to the printing process. Just as the long-term consequences of agriculture and movable type could not be imagined by the people who introduced these innovations, so we today cannot imagine (though we can speculate) what the larger consequences of the collapse of space and the ushering in of omnipresence will be. But we do know one thing: they will be enormous.

Congregationality, Crossroadsivity, and the Internet

Congregationality is the phenomenon by which like-minded people gather together in one place (or “congregate”) for the purposes of mutual support and the furtherance of some common cause. (This concept should not be saddled with the religious connotations of the word “congregation,” though religious congregations are an excellent example of the phenomenon.) Ethan Zuckerman (in a TED Talk) uses the term “flocking” for this phenomenon, clearly drawing upon the old adage "Birds of a feather flock together."

Crossroadsivity is the quality (or the measure of the quality) of being a point where various flows of (social, cultural, or other) traffic cross each other. Crossroads serve to connect remote locations to each other. The greater the connectivity at such points, the greater their crossroadsivity. Hubs and nexus points may be said to possess a high degree of crossroadsivity.

Congregationality and crossroadsivity play a vital role in cultural evolution.

Commonly held memes draw people together (much as “strange attractors” form clustering structures in Chaos Theory), but this is for social rather than memetic reasons. Congregations form out of the personal need for mutual support, whether it is “moral support” or “creative support.” Artists hobnob with other artists, and “schools” and “movements” of art emerge spontaneously as a result. Certain areas become know as places for certain types of people (with a certain meme matrix) to congregate. Paris became a congregation point for Cubists (among other avant-garde artists) in the early 20th century, and for existentialists a generation later. Today, in a similar manner, fashion designers congregate in Paris, Milan, or London, and the glitterati congregate in the Swiss Alps. American homosexuals at one time congregated in California (in the Los Angeles/San Francisco area) or, on the East Coast, in Greenwich Village (which was also a congregation point for artists and other “bohemians”). These congregation points achieve their status as congregation points because they are conducive to the preservation and propagation of the memes held by the congregants. Note that gay culture flourished in California and New York precisely because of the congregation of gays and lesbians in these areas, and also precisely because these areas provided the gays and lesbians who flocked there with the wherewithal to flourish. Tehran, by contrast, could not conceivably be a congregation point for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community—or for free thinkers or secular humanists for that matter. The memetic climate there is simply not conducive to the preservation of such meme complexes.

Quite different from, but related to, the congregation point is the crossroads. The crossroads is not an attractor in the way that a congregation point is. Its virtue lies in its having a strategic location. In other words, it just happens to be a place that travellers have to pass through on their way to some other destination. People are forced to come to crossroads by circumstances unrelated to their memetic makeup or their desire for the company of others with similar meme complexes. The greater the amount of traffic that passes through a crossroads, the richer a place it will be for cultural evolution, for it brings together people with different meme matrices and provides an opportunity for meme mixing, meme borrowing, and meme propagation. Travellers pick up memes at the crossroads from strangers that they encounter, often by accident, and then carry these newly acquired memes off to remote destinations, thus aiding in their propagation. The Fertile Crescent was just such a crossroads in the ancient world, being located, as it was, at the intersection of several trade and migration routes, and it provided the impetus for a great deal of cultural evolution. In fact, it would be fair to say that the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent almost single-handedly determined the shape of the world as we know it today. Over the centuries, however, the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent declined as Rome assumed dominance through its military might and took over as the primary crossroads of the ancient world, as pithily encapsulated in the saying "All roads lead to Rome." Today, the former Fertile Crescent, now renamed memetically “The Middle East,” serves as a crossroads of a different kind, as various groups fight for possession of it or for dominance in the region. It should be noted that crossroads do not necessarily have to be located where trade and migratory routes intersect. Centres of pilgrimage also qualify as crossroads in terms of memetics. They are a sort of cross between a crossroads and a congregation point, for they do attract people to them, but only temporarily, and in this sense they are crossroads-like. Their fluxing populations make them the perfect mixing ground for all sorts of memes. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales provides good evidence that pilgrimage sites—and the act of pilgrimage itself—served as an effective means of meme mixing and meme transfer. In Chaucer’s work, various travelling pilgrims exchange stories and respond to each others’ stories, and they presumably carried these stories back with them to wherever they came from, once the pilgrimage was accomplished.

It is not often that a given location serves both as a crossroads and also as a congregation point. Crossroads are not typically conducive to the preservation of the memes of special interest groups, simply because of the transitory nature of their fluxing populations. Thus, crossroads do not make good congregation points, which tend to be more settled and have more stable populations. Congregation points need to offer a degree of seclusion and protection against the onslaughts of opposing or countervailing forces, something that crossroads cannot provide. However, the digital revolution of the late 20th century collapsed that traditional divide between congregation points and crossroads. Today, the Internet has evolved into a single entity that serves both functions remarkably well, integrating, as it does, the crossroads and the congregation point into one overarching, all-encompassing system.

First, it allows for the co-existence in one place (in virtual space) of multiple congregation points. Websites that cater to every conceivable special interest can be found on the Internet, from Goth culture to esoteric brands of geekery. Homosexuals do not need to congregate in Greenwich Village or along Castro Street any more, though many still do. Their new congregation place is the social networking websites that cater specifically to the interests of the LGBT community, something they can access without ever leaving home. Terms such as “surfing” and “browsing” when applied to the Internet capture quite aptly the congretationality of the Internet. Surfers tend to congregate in areas where the size and speed of the waves make for the most exciting and challenging surfing, and cattle browse where pastures are greenest. Surfing and browsing are congregational activities, whether they are understood literally or metaphorically.

The Internet also functions as a universal crossroads where people from all over the world pass in and out on their way to some other destination. Social networking sites such as Facebook and professional networking sites such as Linkedin are particularly desisgned to fulfill this “crossroads” function. A site such as Facebook makes it “a breeze” to flit in and out of the lives of other people at will, taking in or leaving out as much or as little as one is inclined. The Search Engine (as epitomized by Google) is a prime contributor to the crossroadsivity of the Internet. Search engines makes it possible to pass through, pick things up, and move on, all very much on the fly. It is the new mode of travel along the Information Superhighway. It is the perfect medium for the spread of memes, and it spreads them more rapidly and efficiently than physical crossroads ever did.