Ah the Internet.
A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
And also home to the best network of human communication available in our day in age. If the internet as a whole is representative as a collective consciousness, it says quite a bit about the seediness of society.
But I'm being pessimistic.
Lets focus on the awesome parts of the internet, and what that says about society.
1) fmylife.com
Life sucks. Wouldn't it be great to anonymously post the worst thing that happened to you all day. Now you can compete with others to brag about how miserable you are. Ob Fmylife, users rate others based on how "f-ed" up their day was. You can either choose "Your life is f'd," or you can choose "you deserved that."
If you want to know what this has to do with collective conciousness, the rating system at fmylife brings to light some interesting things. The most supported submissions are about girlfriends dumping boyfriends, etc, while the most unpopular ones are about cheating on spouses or significant others. If you want to be popular at Fmylife its not recomended you spill the beans about your failed attempt to sleep with your wife's friend.
2) Digg.com
Digg is king of internet collective conciousness in my opinion. On Digg, users submit news articles, videos, pictures, blogs and just about any other media you can think of. Then, other users will bump bad stories off the front page, or make sure they hit the top 10 stories list.
Interestingly enough, stories have taken a pattern at digg. It seems the community realizes exactly what it wants, so you always see stories about Ron Paul, LOLcats or Apple on the front page of Digg. Digg has created a few memes in the process of becoming the community driven portal it is.
3) Wikipedia
Wikipedia gets a lot of flak from academia because anyone can edit an article. But in my mind, the ability for community to upkeep a website together is an accomplishment. The editors are usually quick to catch many of the large mistakes, and the users all tend to cooperate.
Plus its really fun to see how you can get to Jesus from other articles. I got 6 with Kevin Bacon. Scary!
