Is The Social Web The Seventh Sense?

Smart phones with cameras and video cameras, email, txt and Web-connected to Social Networks, Twitter, blogs…everything. You can publish text, audio, images in seconds. It can spread across the Web in moments. One of the most common definitions of Twitter is that it is a live-feed of what is happening.

With so much interconnection (2 million emails per second, 55 million “tweets”/day, 55 trillion links and over 100 billion clicks per day) and activity, does being connected enable us to develop a Seventh Sense of the pulse of humanity all around us? There’s 8 terrabytes of traffic per day, 65 billion phone calls/year and 2 billion location nodes activated with over 600 billion RFID tags in use…and that was in 2007.

I think we’re getting there. Media channels are combining into one single platform (more on that later.) So does this mean that the more we’re connected we are connected to a new “sense”? Perhaps called Humansense? or maybe Global Awareness? Human Awareness? Cognitia?

Will such a sense of awareness lead us to think on a more globally aware level? I like to hope that means more chance for peace and the elimination of racism and prejudice.

We are so thoroughly connected now. We can easily disconnect. In fact we see this in generational terms; the Boomers are less connected that the Gen X, and they less than Gen Y and the Lost Generation…but we want to connect, because we want to learn and grow. Perhaps mental Darwinism at play?

Can you imagine yourself withut the alphabet and writing?

(Author: G. Crouch)