ABSTRACT
Forty thousand years ago, in the Paleolithic caves of Spain [1], it is possible that early humans had their first business meetings. They gathered in one special space, signed in by painting outlines of their hands, defined their goals with images of their hunting targets, and listened to what the leaders had to say about the group. Survival in a dangerous, dynamic environment was the main business in those days, as it is today. Our technology has replaced the stone cave with a CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment), our handprints are log-ins, and we watch video images of our leaders speaking. The circle around a campfire was replaced by a conference call and replaced again by a circle of avatars around a virtual campfire. You might say that not much has changed, except that now, with a virtual presence, we can attend meetings in several places simultaneously. Our modern world puts our brains under the constant pressure of assimilating many layers of information simultaneously. Day to day, we are almost always surrounded by multiple screens and immersed in a collective point of view that looks in multiple physical and temporal directions at once. Look around you when you walk down a street or in an airline terminal or even examine what is on your desktop computer. Odds are you are observing through many windows, many screens, and many cameras simultaneously, and your visual memory is filling with images that are a bricolage of daily observation, news media images, websites, and digital content. This is not just an internal phenomenon, collected in your visuospatial sketchpad. The Internet has become a social memory, creating the fabric of our collective experience and the widest-ranging evidence of our existence. Babies are born with their Facebook pages set up by their socially networked parents [2]. These children will grow with their life’s memories recorded and shared socially; their personal narratives will be lived collectively with their peers and then perhaps stored and downloaded to the next generation after they are gone.
