How To Create a Personal Digital Noosphere
Creating Alternatives To Centralized Knowledge-Access Repositories “The noosphere represents a new global consciousness. Sort of a Gaia theory applied to memetics. In the world of the internet, memes aren’t restricted to individuals and their creations.
Memes now drift around in this giant collaborative environment.” Is Google my only door to access information that is available out there? What Google does not see, I will not see.
Though that would appear to be a relatively small problem given the quality of Google indexes, the issue would arise if Google were ever to become inaccessible on some kind of permanent basis. In such a hypothetical situation, one would be hard-pressed to find alternative ways to search and find critical information.
It would appear as a potentially devastatingly useful idea the possibility of simply leveraging two of the most critical components contributing to our building of a personal noosphere: a) our personal exploratory and minute-by-minute online experience, the infinite history of Web sites, documents, videos, and other content we continuously go through in our daily use of the online virtual world. b) our pre-selected network of information and communication agents, the ones that we refer, look up to, check upon, and touch base with when we are looking for know-how, advice, or simple inspiration in the activity we are taking on.
These two components could be integrated into a local desktop application capable of creating a local universe of content while leveraging both a P2P, “trusted” crawling approach and the global history of all the content we were ever to access.
In one direction, each one of us could leverage her network of selected contacts to systematically crawl the Internet to gather extra references to resources auto-filtered by our own network agents themselves (the people you rely on to find your own news).
In another, we could leverage our continuous exploratory experience with information by creating an unlimited archive of all Web sites and online information we ever access.
Wouldn’t I wish to be able to search backwards across the ocean of Web sites I have gone through, including those that don’t exist anymore? What value! Every single page, photo, animation, and sound I go through, I want it to be downloaded and to remain available to me.
I want all of this content to auto-index around dynamic filters and keyphrases that I may change according to needs. A personal digital Akashic record would be of extreme value both to the individual as well as to everyone else spinning off her network.
Many personal digital Akashic records interconnecting transparently with each other would likely provide a powerful mechanism for speeding up the fast evolutionary process taking place through communication by several orders of magnitude.
Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on Wednesday, 30 April 2003, as “How To Create A Personal Digital Noosphere”
Robin Good
