Originally published 30 October 1995
The French scientist/theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, believed that life on Earth is driven upwards towards complexity and consciousness by a psychic force present in all of matter. The highest level of evolution would be a collective web of human consciousness, superposed on the already-existing biosphere and embracing the entire planet.
He called this worldwide web the noosphere, from the Greek word for “mind.”
Well, the noosphere is here, wrapping the planet at the speed of light, a vast virtual universe of disembodied human thought. It is called the Internet.
Our household has recently gone on-line, thanks to my son, who finds it hard to live without electronic links to the rest of the world. He swims in the noosphere like a fish, using a tool called Netscape to navigate oceans of information.
What’s out there? Does the Internet represent a sublime new level of cosmic consciousness, as envisaged by Teilhard? I went net surfing to find out.
The amount of information on the net is truly astonishing, although it is not at all clear what I can do with it. It was fun to download weather maps from the National Hurricane Center showing hurricanes whirling across the Caribbean, but I can see pretty much the same thing on the Weather Channel. Astronomical images from the world’s great observatories were fun to explore, but I can find better quality versions in Sky & Telescope magazine.
Virtually every information-gathering institution in the world has an address on the net, and there are newsgroups through which people share enthusiasms for everything from antique furniture to deviant sex. But what most impressed me is the extent to which this digital universe has been colonized by individuals. The Internet is a true anarchic democracy. Anyone with a personal computer and a telephone line can stake a claim in cyberspace.
The Internet is a giant refrigerator door for humanity, on which people can stick photographs, newspaper clippings, their children’s art, invitations, notes, announcements of the church bazaar — anything they think others might be interested in seeing.
Some people just want to share their pets. Clicking through a pet menu I found a photo of a hedgehog named Hodges. I noticed a listing for another hedgehog named Velcro, but one prickly pet was more than enough for me. God knows how many cats, dogs, canaries, and tropical fish have found a place on the net.
I read somewhere that the most frequently downloaded Internet image is of someone named Teri Hatcher. I didn’t have a clue who she is, but I easily found her on the net, and obtained on my screen a photo of a nicely-put-together young TV actress wrapped in a Superman cape and nothing else. Certainly an improvement on hedgehogs, but still of questionable interest.
Actresses, actors, strippers, and and other aspiring entertainers put their pix on the web, apparently hoping to be discovered in the electronic equivalent of the legendary drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. But ordinary folks also create personal web sites, called “home pages.” Out of a seemingly endless international listing of names I randomly clicked on “Victoria Hamilton” and there she was, a pretty microcomputer consultant for the University of Southern California. Maybe I’m just a sentimental old fool, but I thought the fresh-faced Victoria was much more attractive than the pixilated actress in the Superman wrap.
From Miss Hamilton’s home page, I clicked to the home pages of her friends, and then to the home pages of their friends, and so on. I traveled far enough along this web of relationships to observe an engagingly diverse group of young people who seem eager to share their photos and personal histories with the world.
Whole families get into the act. Under family listings I clicked on the Zimmerlins of Grover Beach, California, for no other reason than that they were at the end of the list: Jim, Kellyn, their two kids, Shari and Jeff, two cocker spaniels, Dipper and Daisy, three cats, two rabbits, four cockatiels (whatever they are) and a rat, with photos and bios. This is apparently the Internet equivalent of those mimeographed letters that people send out to family and friends on Christmas, the difference being that these home pages are available to millions of viewers worldwide. The reason why people put their families on the ‘Net escapes me, but then I never understood those mimeographed Christmas letters either. Anyway, the Zimmerlins look like a lovely family.
I net-surfed long enough to realize that one might click one’s way into some of the seamier corners of the human spirit, but by and large the Internet seemed a rather bright and homey place to be.
As I downloaded hedgehogs, babes in capes, Victoria Hamilton and friends, and the Zimmerlins, I thought of Teilhard de Chardin, the gentle mystic who dreamed of a web of pure consciousness, the divinely-guided culmination of 4 billion years of planetary evolution. And I thought of the electronic noosphere I had entered, a vast virtual universe in which humanity has begun to search for love, sex, money, fame, attention, connection.
I’m not sure it is exactly what Teilhard had in mind.
