…however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.
–Evans.
It’s not easy trying to encapsulate all the changes in media today. One way to understand the changes is to think of the new encompassing the old, in ways that both retain and revise the old.
We can perhaps look to how the human brain has evolved, with new structures encompassing or added to the old, or becoming parts of new functionality, such as has occurred through the development of the Neocortex, and it’s “folding”. structure.
Scientists have observed changes in the folding of the brain, as well as in the thickness of the cortex. The more convoluted the surface of the brain is, the greater the surface area of the cortex which allows for an expansion of cortex, the most evolutionarily advanced part of the brain.
Greater surface area of the brain is linked to higher intelligence as is the thicker cortex but there is an inverse relationship—the thicker the cortex, the more difficult it is for it to fold. In adult humans, thicker cerebral cortex has been linked to higher intelligence.
Our forms of communication/ media evolve too, and the changes they bring about are much more complex than one form of media simply replacing another. Therefore our attempts to explain/ understand the ongoing changes today are severely limited, as we always struggle to “Understand Media” as McLuhan stated. We thus need placeholder terms that can at least refer to this further evolving media complexity, and today that term is “Metaverse”.
Metaverse, BTW, recalls a term that Teilhard de Chardin used close to a hundred years ago.
Tatiana Plakhova / complexitygraphics.com
The term noosphere was first used in the publications of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his Cosmogenesis.
The founding authors Vernadsky and de Chardin developed two related but starkly different noosphere concepts, the former being grounded in the geological sciences, and the latter in theology.
Both conceptions of the noosphere share the common thesis that together human reason and the scientific thought has created, and will continue to create, the next evolutionary geological layer. This geological layer is part of the evolutionary chain.
Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans