The article noted that in January 2009, daily traffic was 2.4 million transmissions, but it grew to 26 million tweets by October.  Then, the writer Noam Cohen noted the importance of geographic location to high quality information: “Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online.”

Twitter at present offers uncannily high quality information, if presented in 140 characters, in real time.  A major issue is access to information, which is stymied by Twitter’s present inability to control other variables.  That is changing.  The NY Times article suggests that Twitter is considering initiating a management tool that allows searchers for content to focus on both time (as long as the time is recent) and place.  The article describes the ability to then monitor individuals’ responses to, for example, the Ft. Hood horror, while it’s happening.

I’ve been writing about the growth of these communication tools for two years in the context of evolutionary theory and the tracking of lineage across time and space in a political action context.  My focus has been on exploring the birth and distribution of ideas in the way that individuals and species evolve in the context of the environment exerting constant influence.  This began with programmer Dave Larson and me.  We instituted social networking software that allowed the tracking of multiple degrees of separation in a fashion that permitted a tracing of speed, geographic span and number of participants in the context of political action.  That software is up and operating at PJEP.org.  I realized that the power of this model and its ability to track transmissions over time, over space, number of users and depth of degree of separation, offered a unique ability to monitor idea gestation, birth, growth and reproduction through communications technologies.  Dave suggested cell phone technology made more sense than use through a laptop.  Then, I realized that Twitter is already evolving in this direction.

With the news that Twitter is adding on a geographic element to its platform, it is clear that Twitter is exhibiting the kind of flexibility necessary to cooperate with the wisdom of the crowd.  What Twitter users are requesting is high quality information.  The kind of information becoming available with these tools is only beginning to be understood.  An individual is now less than a generation away from access to the evolution of ideas in real time, over time, with an ability to make comparisons over time of varying ideas.  At this point, Twitter does not offer much in the way of archived information that can be searched for patterns over time.  It is inevitable that the crowd will be seeking to understand information not only in the now, but over time.  When time, space, degrees of separation and the numbers of individuals associated with particular ideas are all searchable and then available through reports that offer unique, high quality, interpreted and interpretable information, an unfathomable new zeitgeist emerges.

For example, a poor child in India asks, on her cell phone, the following question:  How much faster would the local economy grow if 100,000 cell phones were made available to the poorest people at $1 a month, and how specifically could those phones be used to achieve that goal?  The child’s friends start coming up with ideas.  The technology would track the evolution of those ideas, including information about which individuals are coming up with the ideas most attended to and which individuals are most involved in the distribution of those ideas.  The application would track the speed, geographic span, degrees of separation and number of participants in the discussion.  Those results of the discussion evoking the most powerful response would be available to all interested in those results.

A transformation of society featuring the horizontalization of institutions, transparency, diversity and the use of microblogging to trace the evolution of ideas offers a profound shift in the way that individuals relate to their environment.  If the kind of access described here is accompanied by the ability of any individual to create a report that offers insight into the patterns now observable by the application, a major shift occurs, with the ability for any person with a cell phone to ask a question that can be answered.  Moreover, it is a question that was unanswerable in the past.  In other words, the kind of information that the environment can offer shifts to reveal depth of pattern or structure not even conceivable in human history.  Regarding ideas, idea origins, distribution, synthesis and reemergence–the stuff that our minds are made of–anyone with a cell phone can go exploring.

I recently attended a conference of local Chicago-area radical and liberal alternative-media specialists, about 75 people, who were seeking a better understanding of how to initiate social change by using new media tools.  More than one speaker got up to describe frustration with recent Right Wing successes at marshalling together large numbers of people to behave in specific ways at particular times and places.  Clearly, large chunks of the Left do not understand the milieu that we are entering.  The forces of change are not taking top-down orders from a single, well financed leader.  The evolutionary current is horizontal.  Individuals are seeking information, not orders.

This change in technology is reflected in a dramatically changing society.  The Left is often unaware of the relationship between a technology that offers high quality information instantaneously and a population that feels empowered to achieve goals.  The more features that Twitter acquires and the deeper an individual can dig to discover underlying patterns, the freer a society becomes.  A result of that freedom will be a complete redefinition or reevaluation of what freedom and individuality really are.  If every individual has access to the same high quality information, then individuality becomes less characterized by how each of us is different than by how each of us uniquely manifests what is the same.  Society informed by stratification gives way to an aesthetic society concerned with an appreciation of nuance, not denial.

The direction that Twitter is headed is good.  The crowd wisdom informing Twitter’s adjustments is a deep wisdom.  It is a wisdom that presupposes we are all connected.  Little is hidden.  And, each is entitled to understand.

A very peculiar thing is happening to time and space.  We are experiencing an elimination of time and space in societal relations.  As individuals, we are experiencing a shift in identity.

Several hundred years ago, we had no watches.  In Western society, a vague sense of linear time accompanied those with access to resources.  They could tell the time.  For the rest, church bells bonged out the hour.

Fifty years ago, we all had analog watches that told time within a couple of minutes.  Periodic synchronization was required.  Digital watches emerged popularly in the 60s.  Synchronization was still often periodically required.  Nevertheless, time had become more linearalized, digitalized, refined.

With cell phones, time has become exact.  Everyone is on the same time.  In addition, space is collapsing.  We call each other while approaching rendezvous, experiencing each other’s presence before sensory confirmation.  Being on time at a particular place becomes a relative concept because we can communicate from any place as we seek to share the same physical space.  An exact meeting place is not required when both have phones.  We just talk as we get closer.

We are moving back toward an aboriginal condition characterized by relative time and place as technology breaks down the barriers of identification with a physical form.  Not only have our senses been expanded by technology, but so has our experience of time and space.

Marshall McLuhan describes the effects on individuals and societies when media encourage seamless communication.  A result is the breaking down of barriers and a shift in personal identity.  It becomes more difficult to experience life as isolated and alone.

Thesis:  Aboriginal experience of time and space as nonlinear, relative and socially centered.  Antithesis:  Modern experience of time and space as linear, exact and individually centered.  Thesis:  Emerging experience of time and space as nonlinear, relative and trans-socially centered, mediated by technology.

Tracing changes in sense of time and space and shifts in personal identity are difficult to do when the current paradigm mostly chooses to exclude consciousness from discussions.  Consciousness is not measurable, so we will not include it in equations.  Consciousness, defined as identity shifts in space and time, goes unremarked as consciousness transforms.

In perhaps every way that matters, the future and the present are also the past.  Unknown patterns become understandable when we trace their history.  Shifts in consciousness begin to make sense when we return from explorations of the past.  An adult is informed by childhood, technology by aboriginal relations, a science discipline by a study of its roots.

When Kuhn described how the transformation of science disciplines are inhibited by textbooks and teaching protocols that hide seemingly unrelated anomalies transcended by current paradigms, he also described how we hide from ourselves features or patterns in the evolution of biology and society.  Whereas biology textbooks don’t note many of the several competing biological evolution paradigms of the nineteenth century, making invisible alternative ways to view the world, in society we don’t note changes in consciousness or identity because these changes do not seem to have social or economic repercussions.

Milton H. Erickson, the hypnotherapy innovator and theorist, observed that it was often far easier to achieve a targeted change for a client coming to him with a specific distressing symptom if the change was made without the client being aware that the symptom had been addressed.  Erickson would work out a contract with the client’s unconscious and make a deal that the client’s conscious would not be aware of, which would result in the presenting problem going away.

Erickson was intimately aware of levels of identity and the robust power that a model of consciousness could afford.  Presupposing unconscious awareness and intention, Erickson was able to negotiate transformation.  Erickson communicated with a person’s unconscious, using the rules that the unconscious was fully engaged in, primary process, with one time, one place, no opposites.  This was Freud’s discovery regarding how very young children, animals and the unconscious experience the world.  This is also the ancient human aboriginal’s world.  One time, one place, no opposites.

It seems that changes in science and society are accompanied by an Ericksonian-like amnesia.  Transformations occur but they seem to be characterized by an almost deliberate choice to not note what has been left behind.  Perhaps it’s time we become our own hypnotherapist and contract with the past to not only reveal connections to the present, but to find out what is necessary to make it possible to be aware of what has been left behind.  No more secrets.  Let the anomalies be revealed and discussed along with the discarded paradigms.  Let society’s changing relationship with itself, its evolving sense of time and space, be the subject of conversation.

Our identity is shifting.  We have the opportunity to be aware of that shift.  There is structure to the personal, societal and biological shift we are in the middle of.  It begins with discovering they are all the same.

I engage in a similar process, focusing on patterns that reflect both personal experience and my social environment.  What interests me are evolution, transformation, consciousness and interconnection.  The news might suggest some specific thing is bound to get worse because there is an evident pattern to support the conclusion, and then it focuses on that thing because it drives viewers to return.  I also have a criterion for what I focus on.  My criterion is that what I follow has to be interesting.

So, reality has little to do with what the media choose to share.  Reality has little to do with what I choose to focus on and write about.  Still, whether a song describes reality isn’t as important as whether the song succinctly expresses feelings and a point of view.  That is what I am seeking to achieve:  a grounded, cogent, emotional slice of real, in the now.

Twitter is such a tiny slice.  I’m seeing it as a crack between the worlds, not unlike that described by Carlos Castaneda.  There were times in the Castaneda books when Don Juan would behave in ways that resulted in Carlos’s perceptions being transformed.  A world characterized by hidden interconnections would emerge.

Twitter is opening a crack that is providing vast numbers of interconnections among people, establishing a routine characterized by a sharing of massive amounts of information at lightning speeds.

Meditating since 1972, in psychotherapy for over half my life, I’ve observed a trend in my perception, my self consciousness, which is characterized by an increasing sense of trust and confidence.  The confidence isn’t exactly in myself but is confidence in that which is unconscious, my conscious or normal self, and people in my life.  I’m not a particularly heart-driven person.  Yet, over time, I’ve experienced a slow growing of trust.  In other words, I can chart out my own personality transformation, nurtured by an environment designed to encourage such transformations, and estimate where my self is headed.

Observing my own personal transformation, I observe society following a similar path.  Twitter is a window to that transformation.

At this time, Twitter mostly seems a game to accumulate followings by offering interest in another person’s life.  That interest seems often feigned as players seek opportunities to share personal experiences with many people.  Nevertheless, in an effort to encourage others to pay attention, there is a tendency to pass on interesting information that has been received, to behave with some authenticity and to be funny or entertaining.  I’m observing a number of interesting patterns that are emerging.

Twitter users grow higher-value microblogging personas by finding and passing on information that their community respects.  Individuals are being evaluated by their access to information and sorting criteria for what is passed on.  Who we are is becoming characterized by how connected we are.  In this horizontal, interconnected, information world, information is valuable.

Suddenly, we have access to worldwide real-time information on what individuals are concerned with in this moment.  Using Google to find blogs that specialized in a particular interest was the last derivation of this trend.  We can now search within Twitter to find people anywhere that share our particular interest or point of view.  Arcane passions can find reflection half the world away.  In real time.

Discovery of a person with astonishingly similar interests can lead to a treasure trove of information.  Simply exploring the list of people that the new person follows can lead to interconnections hidden because websites weren’t achieving high enough rankings or the information was not easily accessible on the web.

Each individual becomes a hub in the universe of his or her interests.  Leaping from hub to hub, exploring followers and followings, I am astonished by the almost infinite variety of connection.  In addition, many personal connections are being made as personal messages between connections encourage trust.  As time is dispensed in the form of messages, relationships are being formed.

Where is this going?  What does this trend line suggest?

This is a massive, incomprehensibly quick realignment to a horizontal, nonhierarchical, nonstratified point of view.  The commons is growing at an incalculable speed as shared resources emerge and disperse both efficiently and at no cost.  Our deep desire to feel respected is transforming into information-sharing behavior, not unlike the aboriginal potlatch.  Instead of seeking conspicuous consumption and hierarchical control, he or she that accumulates seeks to share.

What is occurring is profoundly aboriginal yet astonishingly modern as we each behave as part of a massive, interconnected whole with no mythology, no deity and no rituals that confuse the metaphor with that which the metaphor represents.  We are each reveling in the benefits of life lived with a small band or tribe with no hierarchical barriers to communication, except we are doing so with thousands.  Each individual is in his or her own customized community, with deep shared beliefs that could be described as a reverence for process.

God, now, truly has no name.

Where is Twitter heading?  We are speeding toward behavior that takes into consideration the wider community, a wisdom of the masses that makes understanding available at no cost.

Twitter is the crack that is splitting open an individual’s belief that he or she is alone and can have little effect or influence on the world.  Mainstream media’s reality that life is frightening and we are helpless to intervene will feel strangely anachronistic.  Frames of reference that engender change and transformation will feel familiar.  Don Juan showed Carlos how to shift perception.  Our perception is being shifted by Twitter and what follows.  The trend is clear.  With Twitter we are focusing on the now.

Marshall McLuhan studied the effects of speed and time on social change.  One of his seminal insights was that media mold how we perceive the world, not only by the content that is distributed, but by how specifically media enhance our ability to access information.

It has become evident that the media are about politics.  How we communicate influences the distribution of power and authority.  More powerful than any political manifesto is the way that the words might be conveyed.

There are three foundation, democratizing power centers.  Education controls the ability for an individual to synthesize information.  Voting integrity empowers an individual to act upon the information.  Media enhance access to information.  With fundamental transformations in media, education and voting integrity get a boost.

What we are observing now is an exponential increase in the speed and quality of information distribution.  Everything is changing as a result of this transformation.

Theorists Shirky, Rheingold and others describe the result of barriers coming down with the placement of high-quality resources, such as cell phones and information access, with the formerly disempowered.  A staggering upsurge in creativity results with the belief that an individual can make a difference.  High-quality information can become ubiquitous when it is observed that a system can encourage an egalitarian distribution of high-quality information.  When information stops congregating in the hands of the few, the many feel empowered.

But it’s also the speed.  Information grows stale.  The fact that information becomes available in real time to anyone who can profit from its availability means that the horizontal feels natural.  Why believe in hierarchy when authority is informed by access to information, and information is quick and free?

Eliminate distance and collapse time and we redefine a foundation principle of human nature.  That principle is that there is a difference between being human and being god.  We still mostly believe that the difference between being human and being god is important enough that whether god exists or not, or what stories we have assigned to god, are integral to understanding our place in the universe.  This is changing.

There are no atheists in aboriginal society.  To be a member of the community is to share community beliefs.  We are quickly headed in an aboriginal direction, where society will be characterized by a universality of process.  This is a process not unlike a prehistoric band where each individual has access to all community resources.  A result is deep systemic integration, not alienation, resulting in an experience characterized by synthesis, not stratification.

If “the media is the message,” then the elimination of space and time does away with defining ourselves by what we do or don’t have access to.  Which stories we assign to god or whether he or she exists becomes secondary to the experience that we are not separate.  Eliminate space and time and you eliminate most conflict.  We are talking about the de-alienation of society.

It will take some time for education to catch up with information distribution and provide an ability to evaluate and form conclusions.  Voter integrity will perhaps come faster as it becomes relatively easy to generate double checks by a grass-roots system that combats those places where authority still seeks to congregate.  In the meantime, prepare for the wildest ride a species can engage in.  After having achieved an ability to be alone, be separate, feel alienated, think thoughts and question authority, we are now being introduced to the equivalent of social hallucinogens.  We are being introduced to no time, no space.

This has also been called the eternal now.

In the physics of biology and social change, identity is a variable that, like time, can change.  What is necessary to be able to trace transformations in identity is a model of biological and social evolution that embraces consciousness or awareness as a default feature of the system.  This is quite different from our present predilection to presuppose that the underlying system does not exhibit consciousness or awareness.  Note the works of contemporary, respected evolutionary psychologists Dawkins, Dennett and Miller.  There is an assumption built upon an allegiance to natural selection being the only necessary process to drive evolution.  That assumption is that because god is not necessary for evolution, god does not need to exist.  All three are atheists.

Identity is changing.  And, like the rider on a light beam, we have a difficult task to evaluate the relativistic nature of our experience without access to an alternative landscape.  We need someplace to place our feet.

“Instant speeds abolish time and space, and return man to an integral and primitive awareness.”  (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 152)

The shift in awareness is not just a shift backward as McLuhan proclaims.  Yes, a powerful feature of this identity shift is one where the commons becomes highly valued and contribution to the community is revered.  A feature of aboriginal consciousness is a definition of one’s self as a member of a community.  Yet, something new is being engaged.  The communities of our youth are far more than the few people in a local tribe.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-selected individuals, folks connected to massive self-selected networks of their own, are coming together.

“At present the mechanical begins to yield to organic unity under conditions of electric speed.  Man now can look back at two or three thousand years of varying degrees of mechanization with full awareness of the mechanical as an interlude between two great organic periods of culture.” (p. 152)

Speed transforms.  Eliminate space and time as we are doing now in our massive, horizontal, transparent, barrierless social media relationships and we eliminate features of our own identity.  At the same time that we are individually selecting the participants in our unique social universe, we are also universalizing our experiences by propelling individual experience into a shared space.  We each are becoming artists of our individuality, relying upon the medium of our friends.  We are painting that which makes us unique with colors characteristic of the features of electronic allies.

“As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision.” (p. 204)

We are moving at the speed of light away from the society of alienation toward an online community characterized by integration.  Whereas before we featured an identity that focused on the separateness characteristic of an experiential model that emphasized only arbitrary interconnection, we are moving into a new presuppositional matrix that is characterized by shared identity.  Everything changes.  Politics will transform to reflect a populace that assumes an ability of individuals within communities to effect outcomes.  Evolutionary theory will adjust to embrace features of life and society characterized by environmental influence, integration and systemic wholes.

“A newspaper headline recently read, ‘Little Red Schoolhouse Dies When Good Road Built.’  One-room schools, with all subjects being taught to all grades at the same time, simply dissolved when better transportation permitted specialized spaces and specialized teaching.  At the extreme of speeded-up movement, however, specialism of space and subject disappears once more.” (p. 346)

That feature of society where professionals control information is an aspect of society that is coming down.  From academicians to traditional media practitioners, the proliferation of the horizontal impetus demands that information be free.  Eliminate barriers and you eliminate the comodification of information.  As personal experience features shared experience, our identity shifts to both an aboriginal and transaboriginal space.  In effect, each of us, reengaging our inner aboriginal, also becomes the god of aboriginals with access to almost infinite information.

Einstein discovered time is relative.  So is consciousness.  It is necessary to presuppose that consciousness exists to be able to observe it changing.  Our children are transforming before our eyes.  Identities are shifting.  We’re going to need a new word for god to be able to understand what we are seeing.  There is no longer a need for mythology to illuminate.  We only have to believe our eyes.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication by increasing the number of people we are in contact with every day while seeking to make those communications clear enough to be useful.  We are provided more and more effective sorts, functions and information enhancement features.  Youth trained in multitasking transition quickly to new applications.  Older folks aren’t seeing the advantages of letting go of what they experience as a more intimate, personal experience characterized by fewer contacts.

Developments using Twitter in Iran underline the difficulties of the medium when it comes to integrating or synthesizing information.  The wisdom of the crowds is marginalized when the crowd is looking for high quality information, and all it has is agreement.  Twitter and social networking media are failing to offer insight.  The reason for this is that the applications are not tracing the movement of information in real time, tracking the lineage of ideas as they move across the medium.  The applications are not noting when ideas evolve nor are they paying attention to the identity of the individuals who are present when a new idea emerges.  Furthermore, they are not indicating the individuals who are instrumental to an idea’s propagation.

This is not science fiction.  Now that memes or words representing specific thoughts or concepts can be traced as they spread across a network of users, those memes can be followed in just the way that in biological evolution we can track the evolution of species over time.  With Twitter or a Twitter-like application, we can not only trace the evolution of ideas, we can put into the hands of users an ability to conduct searches for these ideas and their particular evolution trajectories.  In other words, users can request reports like we now conduct a Google search, reports that track the speed, span, depth and breadth of ideas as they move across the web.

For example, in Iran let’s say the conversations that citizens are having regarding the exact kind of administration they would like to see are integrated with where in the country people are congregating with those opinions, who the individuals are that are instrumental in the distribution of those ideas, how fast the ideas are spreading and how many degrees of separation are being generated at what rate.  Imagine anyone being able to issue a report collating that information, using that information to draw conclusions, conclusions fed back into the idea distribution network to be able to be traced for their effect.

The result would not be the kind of chaos observed just after the elections but an automatic, lightning speed, dramatic realignment based upon high-quality, real-time information available to anyone who wants it.  This is the equivalent of nature conducting its usual healing in an area devastated by catastrophe.  With countless species in close communication with one another using the information-sharing channels characteristic of natural systems, unique integrations can emerge as a result of adjustment to new conditions.

For this to work in society, as in nature, there can be no hierarchy.  Every person in the system gets access to the reports that offer insight into the nature of the information.  Whereas now each of us uses “search,” with the direction we are going there will be a second level, a meta level, where each of us uses “report.”  At this level the wisdom of the crowd can become conventional wisdom, investing every individual with enhanced understanding, not just enhanced communication.

There is a not so subtle change that accompanies this shift in perspective, this embracing of the meta level of systems operations.  This change is a change in identity.  As we as individuals begin to understand and embrace a viewpoint characteristic of the way many individuals experience the evolution of information, the identity shift that the young in our communities are experiencing will receive an exponential boost.

Observe that the young are now members of communities, online social networking systems, several orders of magnitude greater than anyone not online.  This is having a profound effect upon how we experience ourselves as individuals.  Our peer groups are now far larger, more unique and often self-selected; they are not inhibited by geography.  Our identities are shifting.  We are voluntarily participating in that process.

Consider this ability to romance the wisdom of the crowds so that this understanding becomes easily accessible with the possibility of being further influenced.  Now consider this effect upon individual identity.  The commons will become common.  We will not be able to think of ourselves without considering others.  We are talking about a feminization of society.

As I was observing Twitter in Iran this June, these two things came to mind.  Social networking does not just have to be only about communication.  Social networking can also be about integration.

Where there is integration, there is a shift in identity.  Social networking can change who we think we are.

People are engaging in such opportunities across society. Mysticism could not be further from their minds.

There was a time in our species’ past, perhaps not so very long ago, maybe as few as 3,000 generations ago, when our experience was not characterized by individuality. One of the several profound differences between then and now was that then we had a far less concise idea of the passing of time. This was true socially and biologically. Socially things just did not change much. There were no fads or fashions. Progress as a concept is barely 250 years old, let alone tens of thousands.

Biologically our brains were not sorting in a narrative, sequential path. When narrative reality emerged and spoken language acquired the ability to parse out past from present and present from future, we acquired individuality at the same evolutionary moment. With our ability to disassociate in time we were also able to imagine disassociation in space or being a different person. Empathy, envy and the other theory of mind emotions are evident in our great ape cousins. Yet, with the emergence of language and time, a depth was added to our ability to identify with the other that has a lot to do with our relationship with the future, our survival as a species and an exploration of what it means to have identity.

We started out with little language, no sense of time, no identity. We grew to become adept at speech, with a powerful sense of time, with identity. Nevertheless, without making the choice to at least on occasion not have identity, or shift identity to experience consciousness on an expanded scale, our powerful sense of time is hobbled by difficulties viewing the future as a commons, a group holding, a possession of something-larger-than-the-self.

Consider time as a territory with the future as the commons. To survive, it is necessary that we pay close attention to where our resources are stored. Paradoxically, they are stored in the future. That is where our descendants live.

This alternative path toward understanding time suggests an emerging new, third way of experiencing self. The commons is sacred space. The future is our commons. To know this we need an expanded sense of self, a shift in identity.

Whereas we started with little or no sense of self before language, with language and culture we’ve acquired a clear sense of self, of time and of that which is within our personal control. The third place, the synthesis of the first two in a sense, involves an expanded sense of self, which is very different from the no sense of self, yet they are related. We’re going from no time, to time, to yes time. We’re evolving to a place where the future can feel familiar as we intuit our connection with people and an earth that does not yet exist.

This is more than an exercise of imagination.

The opportunity we are creating to make that transition has an enormous amount to do with the new online and cell phone communications technologies. We are shifting identity. We are tying together narcissism and mass cooperation, two distinctly different identity levels, expanding our personal boundaries to include the information received from countless others.

Our defined self is being redefined to include self and others.

The next step is to cross the boundary of time.

When tens of millions of people buy SUVs because they see friends buying SUVs and they see SUV commercials telling them to do so, they are responding to one-to-many communications media commands within a consumer economy that congregates profits in the hands of those that control the communications. We are encouraged to be selfish and not think of the future. Exercising a sense of time only insofar as it offers immediate or delayed results to be experienced by the self gets us only part way to where we have to go.

New communications technologies are expanding our sense of self. Along with that our sense of time is changing. The future is ceasing to be a place that we steal from to satisfy a limited self. The future is becoming our vastest commons, offering literally infinite resources to integrate into our expanded sense of self.

While doing so we are redefining mysticism. Spirituality is acquiring another name. Spirituality now has nothing to do with mythology. Shifting identity is the name of what is now a social game.

A unique video emerged on the web several months ago.  In the video, street musicians from cities across Europe, Africa, South America and the U.S. perform where they live, in the street, with headphones on.  They contribute both to the tracks of the performance and to the video that was recording the series of integrated performances.  The song is Stand By Me.

As in the Susan Boyle video, several story lines come together to create a powerful presentation.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, there was a TV show called Tales of the Texas Rangers.  What I loved was the beginning.  A single lawman is walking down the street.  Over the course of the growing intro music, he is joined and followed by others until by the end there are maybe 30 earnest lawmen walking in a triangle with the original guy in the forward point.  He never looks behind him.  He just knows they’re there.

In the street musicians’ video, we have a similar but less contrived production.  It begins with a single vocalist and over the course of maybe three minutes blossoms into maybe a 30-piece performance.  We get to watch each performer join one at a time, with the music growing in depth and nuance.  We are watching street musicians performing in the street.  We pay nothing for the opportunity to listen and observe this literally world class production.

Frank Rich on May 9 wrote a piece describing the void that journalism is disappearing into.  We are having trouble imagining where our news will come from when there is no income engine powering the present model.  Rich cites Clay Shirky, who goes into more detail, comparing the present transition to the switch from long hand to the printing press.

A new source of news is suggested by this street musician video, and it reveals the new direction art is taking.

With the ability of musicians to go global with a Mac and a microphone, we have the separation of art from money.  It’s about time.  I received an art degree with the assumption being that if I wanted to succeed, I would have to appeal to the educated and the affluent.  No longer.

We are in the midst of a major reframing of what success is.

We are observing an integration of almost 200 national economies, the abyss of environmental destruction forcing cooperation between all manner of differences, the surge in the Internet and communications technologies and now the horizontalization and destratification of societies across the world.  As classic capitalism continues to fall, we are heading at breakneck speed into a world where success is measured not by how many things we own or how many assets we control, but by our contribution to the relationships we are a part of.

The street musicians’ video is about making a unique contribution, no matter where we are in the world.  That contribution might be a journalistic representation of our experience or observations, an art or music production or an educational piece.  What we receive in payment may be miniscule by today’s standards.  Think of Wikipedia.  We have begun experimenting with a noncapitalist economy based upon the exchange of creative acts.

The Natalie Cole recording explored crossing the barrier of time to evoke an emotion.  We have begun piercing the barriers of both space and time with powerful and unpredictable results.  Integral to this crossing is the realization that capitalism is not the only way to achieve success.  This is particularly true when you redefine what success means.

Over three billion people have cell phones.  Companies like Nokia are designing phones for the market of people that make about $4 a day.  There is not yet a universal language of communication, but there may soon be a universal communications interface that offers an ability to understand what any other person is saying.

I have a friend, a Florida Jewish commercial fisherman with a grouper vessel in the Gulf, who conducted a romance with a Mexican woman mostly by the Internet.  She spoke only Spanish.  Martin spoke only English.  They communicated by email, translating each other’s words using Internet translation software.  They are now married with a son.

Consider a world language, perhaps iconic and very basic, which allows all peoples to communicate.  It could be a language not unlike the Chinese characters universal to that culture.  It may not be necessary with translation software.  But if invented, it might be something children would embrace, particularly those children participating in many-culture multiplayer virtual communities.

Clearly, it is becoming easier to communicate.

Consider that the anecdotal evidence that our young men are taking longer to grow up is not just the grumblings of older generations.  Neoteny, or the prolongation of younger stages of ontogeny or growth into older stages over time, is a central feature of contemporary society.  Play is not just for children anymore.  Our young adults are spending sizable amounts of time playing with new technologies, technologies that enhance the neotenous perspective; they are egalitarian, horizontal, diverse and transparent.

In other words, there is a juxtaposition of new technologies with a new humanity.  People are becoming both more communicative and more capable of communication as people biologically transform, bringing early childhood stages of language acquisition capabilities into older stages where new communications technologies are being embraced.

Consider also that as these facilities with language prolong from early childhood to young adults, the profound, pervasive and natural creativity, affection and attraction to connection that characterize our small children will be more and more evidencing itself in our older youth.  As adult individuals neotenize, so will our societies, reflecting in their structures and conventions our modified human beings.

It is said that to see the future you have only to look at our children.  Might it be the case that the actual features of our children may be the future of our adults?

A small, isolated island nation may experience the opposite effect.  When only children are required to learn the language, the language, in both sounds and grammar, tends to proliferate novelties.  Children, without the inhibiting convention of adult habits, get creative.  Those adult conventions that are extremely challenging to outsider adults are things that children learn effortlessly.

The most complex languages in the world tend to be those of isolated aboriginals or a people not impacted by their neighbors for many centuries.  When you leave a language to be learned by only children, there is a multiplication of the unique.

What would it be like if that period of time characterized by the linking of countless associations with specific sounds, and the joyous experience that accompanies the learning to produce those sounds, was to prolong into the adult of our species?  Imagine this ability of children to learn language effortlessly drifting forward into older ages.

Neoteny is the prolongation of infant features into the adult of a species with ancestor embryo, infant and toddler features emerging over time in later ontological stages, eventually to emerge in the adults of descendants.  Our chimp-like progenitors had babies with big head-to-body ratios, large brain-to-head ratios, small chins, big foreheads, an ability to amble around upright, creativity, affection and a compulsion to connect.  In other words, our chimp-like forebears had infants that looked a lot like and behaved like contemporary adults.

Biology is not the only scale of experience that evolves.  Society is also influenced by the dynamic that compels biology to prolong the features of infants into the adults of descendants.  Society today reveals neotenous dynamics when new behaviors are invented or embraced by our youngest and carried with them as they age.  Texting, initiated by youth, is becoming ubiquitous across many age groups.  Social networking, at first only used by students, is now engaged in by half the nation.  In just the way that Rock ‘n’ Roll was played at first by mostly high schoolers, today Rock is the soundtrack of our lives.

Over the course of our recent history, many fads and trends emerged with low-income ethnic minorities and fanned out into mainstream culture.  With cell phone and social networking technologies becoming cheap enough for everyone to have, watch for unique and creative uses of these new technologies.  Societal neoteny evidences surges of creativity both from the young and from the disenfranchised.  Those closest to being aboriginal, those in poverty, the artists and the fringe–those furthest from the conventional center–are sources of the creative impulse, that which is newest that can prolong its way up the social tiers.

It is no mistake that there is a dramatic surge in those with autism and Asperger’s, mostly males that are maturational delayed.  We are observing the neotenization of society, the same as biological neoteny, with individuals taking longer to mature, with infant features emerging later and later, particularly the ability to speak.  Those with autism and Asperger’s are the white crest of the wave.  Massive numbers of males are taking longer to mature.

Keep in mind small, little-visited island nations with complicated languages, where children are the only ones to learn those languages.  Then, in world culture at large, consider the additional years that children are taking to absorb the world and develop their communication interface.  The neotenization factor is giving kids in the world at large a longer time to have that special ability to learn language.  It’s as if the astonishing lingual creativity obvious in an island culture is now manifesting in world culture at large, with our children embracing new technology and making new stuff up at a rate unfathomable even a generation ago.

And, in the way that formerly a culture could be isolated, the whole world is becoming integrated, allowing the incubation of creative novelties in the midst of the cacophony of societal interconnecting and combining.

We are members of this island nation with the children growing older while retaining the ability of the very young to create, integrate and understand.

As this child’s ability to make and manifest language creativity emerges in the adult of our species, observe a society that will explode with novelty.

Laughter will become the language of us all.