4.03.2004
The Infinite Many - The Web as a Digital "Collective Unconscious"
We all consider ourselves individuals, yet there are somehow aspects to ourselves to which we cannot attribute to our development, our environment, or our general personality. There are things about every one of us that just seem to be "there." We do not often acknowledge it, but every one of us has a "dark side," to our personality. We can act in a way that is inconsistent with "civilized behavior," if circumstances should unfold in a certain way. We begin to "carve ourselves up" into pieces, parts, aspects, and categories, and often we forget that the disassembly means nothing if we do not put it back together and view the whole.
One of the more interesting ideas of the 20th Century was postulated by Carl Jung, a psychologist and one-time student of the pioneer of Modern Psychology, Sigmund Freud. Jung championed the idea of something called the collective unconscious. Theoretically, this is an aspect to our personality that we are unaware of and cannot be acquired via experience or environment. They are the thoughts and feelings which exist "beneath the surface" of our psyche, and even our unconscious mind is not aware of them. Jung believed the Collective Unconscious was genetic in nature, primarily inherited through our ancestors. Jung's observations went much further. He saw the common "threads" of mythology and literature across cultures with vastly different languages and mores. These common threads were too similar to be mere coincidence, so Jung theorized that some portion of these commonalities is a birthright, no different than skin pigment, hair color, or eye color.
The crossroads of the collective unconscious and common mythologies brings us to another interesting individual by the name of Joseph Campbell, a literary scholar whose lifework was to collect and weave these common threads into a most amazing book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which discusses the commonalities between various mythos across many cultures, eventually demonstrating that they are all an archetype of a single hero, whose story reinvented itself, over and over, as the varied tribes of humanity dispersed to cover the world.
So we have a psychologist and a literary scholar, a man of the mind and a man of letters, whose theories seem to fit together in an ecclectic jigsaw, saying that some portion of us that we are consciously unaware, was a gift from our forbears, and ties us all together in a tapestry as old as time itself. Yet this seems to be only a starting point, a crysalis cacoon phase of our development, for we have found a way to reinvent our collective unconscious yet again. As a caterpillar slumbers and dreams of becoming a butterfly, so we have changed. Through the use of a vast network of interconnected, interwoven computers, we have created a "physical" representation of all there is about us. When we look into it, we see our reflection as if it were a sort of "digital mirror," and it contains the sum total of our ideas, our feelings, our fears, our triumphs, our tragedies, our heros, our villians, and all points in-between. Of course I speak of the very World Wide Web upon which this very post resides.
Where else can we find such a rich representation of all that is best and worst about us than on the web? The web is virtualy infinite in its dimension. It appears far larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. Nobody knows its true boundaries for certain. We have fed it all that we are and all that we might be to the point that none of us can claim to know it all. Most of us never become aware of even the smallest percentage of it. Yet it holds a clear representation of a collective unconscious. Its formlessness extends beyond the horizon, and yet each of us may touch it, leave some small mark upon it that our descendents may somehow come to know what we were by what we left them.
Collective Uncionscious
Campbell's Myths
World Wide Brain
© 2004, J.S.Brown
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One of the more interesting ideas of the 20th Century was postulated by Carl Jung, a psychologist and one-time student of the pioneer of Modern Psychology, Sigmund Freud. Jung championed the idea of something called the collective unconscious. Theoretically, this is an aspect to our personality that we are unaware of and cannot be acquired via experience or environment. They are the thoughts and feelings which exist "beneath the surface" of our psyche, and even our unconscious mind is not aware of them. Jung believed the Collective Unconscious was genetic in nature, primarily inherited through our ancestors. Jung's observations went much further. He saw the common "threads" of mythology and literature across cultures with vastly different languages and mores. These common threads were too similar to be mere coincidence, so Jung theorized that some portion of these commonalities is a birthright, no different than skin pigment, hair color, or eye color.
The crossroads of the collective unconscious and common mythologies brings us to another interesting individual by the name of Joseph Campbell, a literary scholar whose lifework was to collect and weave these common threads into a most amazing book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which discusses the commonalities between various mythos across many cultures, eventually demonstrating that they are all an archetype of a single hero, whose story reinvented itself, over and over, as the varied tribes of humanity dispersed to cover the world.
So we have a psychologist and a literary scholar, a man of the mind and a man of letters, whose theories seem to fit together in an ecclectic jigsaw, saying that some portion of us that we are consciously unaware, was a gift from our forbears, and ties us all together in a tapestry as old as time itself. Yet this seems to be only a starting point, a crysalis cacoon phase of our development, for we have found a way to reinvent our collective unconscious yet again. As a caterpillar slumbers and dreams of becoming a butterfly, so we have changed. Through the use of a vast network of interconnected, interwoven computers, we have created a "physical" representation of all there is about us. When we look into it, we see our reflection as if it were a sort of "digital mirror," and it contains the sum total of our ideas, our feelings, our fears, our triumphs, our tragedies, our heros, our villians, and all points in-between. Of course I speak of the very World Wide Web upon which this very post resides.
Where else can we find such a rich representation of all that is best and worst about us than on the web? The web is virtualy infinite in its dimension. It appears far larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. Nobody knows its true boundaries for certain. We have fed it all that we are and all that we might be to the point that none of us can claim to know it all. Most of us never become aware of even the smallest percentage of it. Yet it holds a clear representation of a collective unconscious. Its formlessness extends beyond the horizon, and yet each of us may touch it, leave some small mark upon it that our descendents may somehow come to know what we were by what we left them.
Collective Uncionscious
Campbell's Myths
World Wide Brain
TANSTAAFL!
© 2004, J.S.Brown
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