(Originally published as Can the Noosphere Save Us in the Spring 2009 issue of LSA Magazine.)
People are flocking to libraries. It happens in every recession: Tough times underscore the value of free information and entertainment. This time around, though, our libraries aren't just repositories of books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs. They're also portals to the web, a very different sort of library than existed during the last long downturn in the early 1980s.
The web is more than an indexed collection of works created at high cost by the few and given for free to the many. It's also a printing press and radio/TV broadcast studio that enables the many, at almost no cost, to create for -- and distribute to -- the many.
This democratization of publishing isn't yet universal. But billions can place words, images, sounds, and video online to be found, read, heard, and viewed by billions. Everyone can be both a writer and a reader, a producer as well as a listener and a viewer. And nobody pays to play.
Near-zero cost to produce and distribute would be miraculous enough. But thanks to the technologies of search, syndication, and social software, connection costs are falling to zero too. If you publish something useful to me, or I to you, it is increasingly likely that the six degrees of separation between us will collapse, and that we will connect and share.
All this was foreseen by Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse and -- in 1968! -- demonstrated a working system that combined a graphical user interface, hyperlinked documents, and telepresence.
Engelbart was inspired by a vision. One day, as a young engineer, he stopped to ask himself: Why am I doing this work? Of what real use are these technologies that fascinate and compel me?
After wandering in a revelatory trance for a few hours, the answer came back. To meet the civilization-threatening challenges we've created for ourselves, we'll need to augment human capability. How? By creating -- and projecting our minds into -- a shared information system that harbors collective memory and harnesses collective intelligence.
In fact you're doing just that if you participate in the blogosophere, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. As we use these free online services, we are creating the planetary network of human awareness that the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin first intuited. He called it the noosphere.
If you're a University of Michigan student or recent grad, you're living in the noosphere. If you're part of my cohort -- I graduated in 1979 -- maybe not. In either case, you may sometimes regard much current online activity as fiddling while Rome burns. And I don't disagree. Amidst the general froth and frivolity, it can be hard to see the firefighters at work.
But if you look carefully, you will find them. Here are three of my favorite examples.
Jean-Claude Bradley, a professor of chemistry at Drexel, is a leading advocate of open-notebook science. His lab notebook is a blog: usefulchem.blogspot.com. There he narrates his work, shares his data, weaves a network of collaborators, and envisions how this open process might enable the automation of aspects of his research that ought properly to be automated.
Susan Gerhart, a retired computer scientist, is losing her vision to macular degeneration. On her blog, asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com, she shares what she has been learning about the assistive technologies that she uses to adapt to her changing circumstances.
John Leeke, a restorer of old homes, wants to help preserve more than just the homes near Portland, Maine, where he lives and works. So at historichomeworks.com he posts videos that show people on every continent how to repair windows and porches. His method for making cheap interior storm windows, if widely adopted, would help meet the urgent need to weatherize our homes.
We are all continually discovering useful knowledge that we want to share. Until very recently, it was costly to transmit that knowledge beyond the local sphere: friends, family, tribe. Now, suddenly, it's free to address the whole world. The only cost is your time. Of course that is the scarcest commodity. But you already invest your time in the crafting of messages that you deliver only to the few. When appropriate, consider placing those messages in online venues where they can also inform the many.
The tragedy of the environmental commons will not similarly play out in the information commons because, as Jefferson observed, "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." The library is open. Visit often, and use its free services in every way you can. While you're there, light a few candles of your own. We're all in this together. There's never been a greater need, nor better opportunity, to pool and apply what we collectively know.