The Global Mind

In the 1950s, the theologian Teilhard de Chardin envisioned a planetary "thinking circuit," a realm of the mind akin to the biosphere, that would arise with advances in telecommunications. Later, Marshall McLuhan famously forecast a "global village" in which parochialism would vanish and we would all live in a "simultaneous happening."

The advent of cyberspace has now made these ideas more than new age fantasies. In particular, the explosion of the Internet in the last five years has provided the hardware for the emergence of what could be called a "global mind." The dream has been wired.

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