What is the Metacortex?
Facebook posts going viral are a great example of the exponential distribution that I was talking about in my previous post. As soon as a post gets some likes, facebook’s ranking algorithm will share that post with more people giving it the opportunity to acquire more likes. If it continues to acquire more likes it will spread further and further in the community. It’s pretty cool actually because it’s self propagating. Like a neural impulse where the post is the signal and we are the neurons passing the it along.
From time to time the post goes viral and one story can reach millions of people. And once it does, once we’ve all been exposed to the same or similar information, interesting things happen…
I like to call these events ‘meta-thoughts.’ They are things that the collective consciousness has spontaneously generated and found to be important. Think about things like ‘solar freaking roadways.’ The idea caught on and made it’s way throughout the internet and got everyone talking about it. And when you consider all those meta-thoughts together, you get something called the meta-cortex; the collective consciousness of our society. It’s always been a real thing, but now technology has made it more quantifiable.
These meta-thoughts aren’t always great. I would argue that most of the time they are actually pretty silly things like memes and cat videos. I think this is because those simple memes fulfill very basic needs, like the need to feel joy or be entertained. But from time to time we get support behind important causes, like the ALS ice-bucket challenge. And that kind of action is fascinating to me because it fulfills a higher need, like the need to help others, feel connected or stand up to injustice or ignorance.
What’s incredible to me, is how seemingly intelligent and fair the collective consciousness can be. It seems like many of these reactions are progressive and move in the direction of social harmony, rather than discord. With that said, the idea that they are all harmonious is too good to be true. Think about the KKK rallies and that creepy ‘pro rape’ group that emerged because of all the pent up hate that is now easily transmissible.
And therein lies the problem. I have no way of reliably gauging what the entirety of the collective consciousness is thinking. Maybe there isn’t as much consensus as I like to think. I have a better vantage point than the one I had before Facebook (or any kind of social media for that matter). But it’s still a bit of an echo chamber because the nature of facebook’s ranking algorithm. It is flawed partly because of the self-reinforcing nature of what posts get recommended, and partly because of the secrecy of what goes into the algorithm.
My main takeaway is this: I think getting more in touch with what is actually going on collectively is a good thing. We aren’t all that different in our needs and thoughts. There’s a reason for life-story cliches after all. Technology is improving our ability to get in touch with the meta-cortex, but it doesn’t mean we aren’t without challenges. The mainstream media, and even Facebook itself, have an agenda, namely personal gain. And because of that they, to different degrees, have an inherent conflict of interest with sharing the truth because in the short-term it may be to their detriment.
But I’m hopeful that as technology continues to evolve, society continues to progress and old hatreds dies off, we will become more and more in touch with the collective consciousness, and therefore each other. But until then, we have to make do with a world full of liars and sociopaths who manipulate the flow of information.
