"Is Virtual Collective Consciousness the Future?"
"Is Virtual Collective Consciousness the Future?"
by Yousri Marzouki
by Yousri Marzouki
"Britlin Losee was a breakthrough for Whitacre's musical creative mind, not only through her dazzling admiration to the artist but most important through her deeply intimate and spontaneous endeavor. Her sensational YouTube video message is a load of emotional cues. This young girl inspired what is now referred to as Eric Whitacre's virtual choir. The hundreds of vocalists who responded to Whitacre's online appeal had to follow his "silent" directing gestures and provide their own tinge to the performance. Thus, the psychological phenomena underlying such amazing virtual collective action are worthy to be addressed. I hypothesized the following: in order to achieve this kind of performance, the vocalists must call upon something called by psychologists: the affective theory of mind (AToM). I have tried to provide in this article a brief psychological account of the virtual choir phenomenon through the lens of this recent concept.
Seen from this perspective, we can assume that Eric Whitacre solicited the individual reenactive empathy of each virtual vocalist. However, the resulting collective performance is what makes Whitacre's virtual choir another interesting example of a virtual collective behavior. Indeed, I have suggested with Oullier in a previous article a general framework that we called the Virtual Collective Consciousness (VCC) as an attempt to describe such online collective actions. Drafted on the Durkheimian idea of collective consciousness, the VCC refers to ideals and attitudes shared by various individuals belonging to the same cyberspace. Before reaching a momentum of complexity, each collective behavior starts by a spark that triggers a chain of events leading to a crystallized stance of a tremendous amount of interactions otherwise called an emergent global pattern. This spark was without a doubt Britlin Losee's video that stimulated Whitacre's reenactive empathy, then the artist did about the same with each virtual vocalist until the final cut of the choir revealed an amazing collective summation of all these individual empathies.
In one of his many interviews about the virtual choir, Eric Whitacre (2010) said: "It was all about connecting and about somehow connecting with all these people all over the world and these individuals alone together". In saying that, Whitacre as a visionary artist, joins the ideas of Watts (2007), a visionary social scientist who mentioned that: "Social phenomena involve the interactions of large (but still finite) numbers of heterogeneous entities, the behaviours of which unfold over time and manifest themselves on multiple scales." In fact, the big changes caused by the Web 2.0 mass communication tools were very successful in fostering new perceptions and promoting new standards of collective consciousness about our world. In this regard, the virtual choir can be remembered as a genuine example of a virtual collective empathy. It looks like we are witnessing a paradigm shift from the old Shakespearian credo about existence to an updated one that fits the bill for today's societies. This new credo can be simply stated as follows: "connected or not connected, that is the question".
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.
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