Unlocking the Collective Unconscious of Humanity

Good or bad, the Internet is having the effect of unlocking the collective unconsciousness of humankind in a way that nothing before it has managed to do. We can see both the better and worse sides of human nature by the kinds of sites that become developed and those that become heavily frequented. This is especially evident with pornographic areas of the web--large regions of the web have developed rather openly and easily available, covering all subjects once only banal and illicit. People are able now, solely by virtue of the Internet, to freely develop under the carpet "sub-cultures" that span long distances within which they can find expression, cultivation and social reinforcement for alternative values and life-styles. Cultural "sharing" has taken new dimensions, especially as shared "subjectivities" reach new levels of virtual visibility and expression. In fact, the worldwide web and its evolving topography of sites and surf-traffic is a wide-open area for anthropological inquiry and research in this regard.

What can we expect from such a mass phenomenon. We might talk about the collective "de-repression" of humanity--the unlocking of many socially constrained compulsions and inhibitions that kept us to the tried and true paths of conventional life. But "de-repression," if there really is such a thing, has its own kinds of entailments. It will entail new standards of correctness and value to be artificially superimposed on many facets of behavior and experience that were once taken for granted as natural if somewhat exclusive private. It thus entails new responsibilities to use our new found freedoms of expression and concommitant behavior in a socially responsible manner. The entire world is rapidly coming of age in the era of the Internet, no matter what the cultural framework of the individual. We can look forward to new kinds of social maturity, new kinds of reactions, and new kinds of psychological and social problems that are directly or indirectly the consequence of the Internet.

Good or bad, it can be said without a doubt that the unlocking of the collective unconscious by the Internet will unleash new found human powers for both creativity and destructiveness, and it will be, most certainly, an inevitable, unavoidable consequence of the information revolution.