INTO THE PSYCHOSPHERE

Dick Pountain/17 March 2010 11:06/Idealog 188

I'm not one who makes up new words lightly, which makes me rather restrained by IT industry standards, where marketing departments make up several a week. Perhaps it's because I make a living from words and inventing new ones feels like debasing the currency, plus the fact that most new words are ugly. One I hate in particular is "blogosphere", which sounds like the single testicle of some mythical forest monster. However I've softened toward the term recently, having accepted that it does refer to something real for which there's no other suitable word.

Let's consider the precise meaning of blogosphere from two aspects. On the one hand it's a physical phenomenon, a vast network of interconnected computers each containing a chronological list of utterances by an individual person that is readable from all the others. On the other hand you can ignore these physical underpinnings and view it as a realm of human discourse, an enormous virtual space where people exchange ideas and opinions much as they would do if they were in the same room (though often far less politely). The blogosphere is a massively-connected flux of messages, a minority of which are original messages entering for the first time while most are old messages ceaselessly circulating, copied from node to node. Occasionally a message leaves the blogosphere and emerges into the "real world" by appearing in a printed publication or on the TV news.   

There's something about this conception of a blogosphere that puts one in mind of Richard Dawkins notion of "memes", in which he describes the way ideas get passed around the pool of human speakers and subjected to selection pressure analogous to that which affects genes, namely success in physical reproduction. However there are subtle differences between the two notions. In Dawkins' meme theory, selection pressure gets applied by individual minds when they accept or reject a particular idea like Christianity, or The Offside Rule. In the blogosphere however, whatever selection does take place (and it isn't much) is mostly governed by the connectivity of the network rather than the content of the messages: some blogs have lots of connections, others far fewer, which actually sounds more like the neuronal structure of the brain than of a gene pool.

Thinking about all this tempts me, much against my better judgment, to coin a new word, to wit "the psychosphere". There are several billion human beings on this planet each of whom has a mind that can store memories and use them to generate ideas. We don't have direct access to contents of each other's minds, but we can talk to each other (even if through an interpreter) to exchange such ideas, which means the whole human world is a massively-connected network that long pre-existed the blogosphere. Let's call this the psychosphere.

We all keep images of the people we know in our own minds, which are not merely visual and auditory but also behavioural: they help us to guess what the other person is thinking and predict how they will react to us. Such representations aren't merely descriptive but have the most profound effects on real-world actions. In fact they're the glue that binds societies together. For example a hierarchy involves images of other people as being above or below us in authority, and they govern whether or not we obey those people. Bonds of affection are governed by images of other people as liked or not liked. We constantly manipulate the image we want to present to other people as we negotiate different institutional contexts, all the stuff that US sociologist Ervin Goffman used to call the Presentation of Self. 

While this psychosphere is something like Dawkins' realm of memes, it isn't confined to ideas, words or thoughts but includes all manner of physical behaviours like rituals, tics, dances, flinches, bows, kisses and kicks, and it can illuminate the roots of certain religious notions quite separately from the theologies into which they later evolved. Whenever a person dies, something about them most certainly does persist after their death, but it isn't their ghost, soul or spirit - rather it's the image of them in the minds of all the various people who knew them. This psychospheric "ghost" can survive as long as those people live, and if the dead person was particularly powerful or charismatic - say an Alexander or a Jesus or a Siddhartha Guatama - then stories about them might be told to the next generation, and so on. Of course the image will alter at each telling, exaggerating some qualities at the expense of others, until the historical image bears little resemblance to the original living person. Instead the person's image becomes the symbol for some quality - bravery, compassion, wisdom - that a particular group of people wish to cultivate. The evolutionary purpose of our mental images of others was to help predict other's behaviour, and that purpose lives on in the psychosphere whenever we ask ourselves "What would X have done?" For some people X might be Jesus Christ, for others it might be Mao Tse Tung. It's a powerful and dangerous mechanism for inducing uniformity of behaviour - freeing yourself from it is very hard, and the result not always easy to live with...