Virtual Collective Consciousness - the new internet society

What's struck me so much since the Abbott budget, is how fast communities have been able to mobilise and fight back against the pollies in Canberra. Thousands of emails have been sent to the crossbenchers for example, directly from ordinary people, telling them of what it would mean if the gov's measures were voted through. The message has gotten through loud and clear. Such a thing would've been impossible a few years back.

Hence we have some sort of online human consciousness happening, giving us all an ability to be much more active and involved in the political decision making than ever before. The public has become empowered as never before. To educate, communicate and organise. 

I've found out that there's even a field of study about this consciousness, called Virtual Collective Consciousness. 

Hence, the possibility of a leaderless revolution is likely to be (at least partially) explained by the spontaneity, the homogeneity and the synchronicity of the actions of these cyber-activism networks that were catalyzed by social media. This explanation is supported by what we coined virtual collective consciousness (VCC) referring to an internal knowledge shared by a plurality of persons. Coupled with "citizen media" activism, this knowledge emerges as a new form of consciousness via communication tools. 

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With the deepening of globalization in 21st century, the new geopolitical landscape allows a new vision of democracy where ordinary citizen might be more empowered than ever before to choose an alternative system and change policies. Carne Ross anticipated such global citizen behavior months before the Arab Spring burst out. In his manifesto "The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century," he provides nine principles on how ordinary citizens can regain control of the decisions that directly impact their lives. We support the idea that these principles should be federated around a global consensus shared by citizens. more