GroupsRus

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Modern psycho-social researchers see the invention of printing and later expansions of the media as in some way an extension of human consciousness. (REFS)

It's obvious that a dictionary, or a thesaurus, or even a grammar, can be used by a human to underpin their linguistic resources, and that libraries and other stores of content are in some sense supplementary to the internal resources of the human brain. They can be and are used extensively by writers, researchers and just plain interested people to supplement their own internal cognitive resources.

It's not even unreasonable to see the expanded reach of consciousness as an evolutionary adaptation that adds to the fitness of individuals, the groups they belong to, and eventually society as a whole.

Physical means of extending linguistic consciousness have been succeeded by other types of recording technique, including video, DVD, movies, and computer storage. All these add to the reach of consciousness.

Alongside the development of storage media has come an expansion in the means of communication that are available to humans. The telephone, television, radio, the humble fax and mobile phones can all be seen as supplementary to the basic senses with which biological evolution had equipped humans. With these expanded senses we can explore the expanded content universe at will.

The coping-stone of this pyramid of extra awareness is of course the Internet. A normally well-educated human can use the Internet to access the totality of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, and to apply it to life situations

This doesn't just mean that an individual is incomparably more powerful as a social agent, it also spells death for a wide range of intermediary mechanisms that have served to educate, inform and amuse.

Unlike other inventions that have increased human consciousness, the Internet plays to the strength of groupishness.

But only the Internet provides a means of forming groups, of enhancing communication between group members, and of allowing the development of a social environment for geographically-separated group members.

Groups are often called 'communities' on the Internet. Virtual reality communities such as Everquest satisfy wholly unfulfilled human needs for social groupings, and are developing moral environments that are at least as complex as those provided in the 'real' world.

Although consciousness may have originated way back in animal evolution, there's no doubt that cognitive power, and presumably consciousness as part of that, expanded greatly with the arrival of social groups. And as these groups became larger among early humans, the human brain became larger, allowing the development of conceptual language, the capacity to store a lexicon, the capacity to store information about multiple relationships, and the emergence of 'social' emotions such as empathy, including the grandly-titled Theory of Mind, that is, the ability to impute intentionality to other humans, something which is the sine qua non of a social group. All this was delivered by the larger brain (although separating cause and effect is controversial), but there was some sort of limit at perhaps 150 individuals. Anyway that was enough for the emergence of morality as we now understand it.

This was already enough for humans to compete successfully against the competition, both animal and Neanderthal. Nature was not tamed, but could be lived with.

Then came farming, some technology, lots of trade, and eventually the state and religion as an evolution of the group which allowed larger numbers of individuals to cooperate. Interesting that this doesn't seem to have been an adaptation driven by competition to survive - unless the competition was by now between different human groups. Yes, that makes sense. Anyway, what were the adaptations needed for these larger groups to be successful? The communication of information between generations (writing, books, schools) and the use of texts (the 10 Commandments) to control large groups. This stage occupies the early parts of recorded history (it wouldn't exist for us if recording hadn't been possible!) including the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

Then comes the Nation State, for which printing seems to have been the necessary evolution - a way of educating, informing, controlling masses of people who would have been beyond the reach of copyists. In the previous stage, morality was no longer an ever-renewed function of the group, but was still delivered and enforced via religion. In fact, many communities were not that far away from the original kin-group level (guilds, villages etc, able to maintain a local moral structure based on the shared knowledge of their members). With the Nation State came anomie, anti-social behaviour, the 'working class', the -isms, and above all, modern warfare.

After the Nation State comes what? There have always been individuals who were strong and clear-seeing enough to have their own moral structures, but they were a tiny minority. Increasing economic wealth, better education (sort of!), more leisure, and better access to information have created very large numbers of people with some independence of action; but there are no structures to accommodate them. The old institutions which incorporated groupish ideas have decayed, and 'let 1,000 flowers bloom' when imposed on a top-down basis merely creates 999 weeds for every flower.

Enter the Internet. Even without the Internet (which perhaps, like God, really does deserve its initial capital) there has been an enormous expansion of the information available to an individual, through radio, television, personal computer storage, etc. On its own, the extra information may make it possible for an individual to recreate herself apart from the herd; but it doesn't offer a structure within which 8 bn people can co-exist peacefully and productively.

It's a curiosity of the modern world that competition (even the little remaining competition between nations, which may have been driving social evolution) is being legislated away by the globalization process. Nowadays it is 'managed' competition. That's a worry perhaps, in so far as global institutions have monopolies for the most part, and even the saintly WTO is liable to go astray if it doesn't have competition. So far, at any rate, globalisation has been a success: the WTO, the OECD, the UN, the IMF, Greenpeace, Medecins Sans Frontieres, WIPO appear mostly to be beneficial monopolies, although the recent history of the OECD shows what can happen if an entrenched monopoly, however beneficent, falls into the wrong hands.

Despite the growing role in social and cultural development of institutions above the level of the basic human group, humans retain their groupish natures because they developed before external, over-arching social institutions became the focus of evolution, and genetically speaking, humans don't appear to have changed greatly in the last 30,000 years.

Within the nation state, groups have had a chequered career. Some groups have been used by the State as a means of delivering or supporting moral structure, of which the most obvious is organised religion. At one time mutual and cooperative organisations, which had their roots in smaller, local communities, were also important, along with private clubs or groupings, for the delivery of education, medicine, welfare and other social goods. The State has arrogated and centralised these roles of private groups, with predictably bad results; even the church has now been disestablished in many countries (eg the UK). The State evidently thinks that it doesn't need any help in proselytizing or giving moral guidance; or rather, its paranoid need to control everything has led it to chuck the moral baby out with the bathwater of independent action.

Some types of group are non-threatening to the State, and maintain their activities over long periods of time without interference from above. Social clubs, recreational groupings (eg cricket clubs), the Ramblers' Association, operatic and dramatic clubs, motorists associations and investment clubs are all examples of innocent association in the State's eyes; although occasionally legislation reaches out to influence or control some aspects of their activities.

Other types of group are regarded as menacing or immoral by the State, and are proscribed, pursued or heavily controlled as a result. In the UK, Mosley's Back Shirts and their modern day descendant the National Front are examples. On the whole, nation states' problems in this direction were largely limited to their own territories, simply because the maintenance of a potentially subversive organisation across the borders of nations was physically difficult, fairly easy to detect, and even easier to stop.

The most important consequence of the effective ethical monopoly of the Nation State is that its model of top-down moral suasion (the 'Nanny State') is unsuited to the way in which the human mind works, leaving individuals without an effective internalised moral structure. Litter, suicide, rape, violence, thuggery and the rest are the all too obvious result. Humans, though, won't be stopped from associating with each other (even hoodies are being groupish) and it is not surprising that the growth in power of the State - denying individuality on the one hand - is matched on the other hand by an explosion of interest in association. People's individuality is reinforced, even perhaps created, on the basis of associative building blocks, and what the major institutions of society no longer provide for them they will always seek to provide for themselves.

Many associations (groups, clubs, call them what you will) play an ethical role in addition to their 'groupish' contribution. Lots of them exist for charitable purposes, or have such purposes in addition to their basic role ('Friends' organisations at schools, for instance). Many more have sets of internal rules which control the behaviour of members during group activities, or even in some cases beyond. A London gentlemens' club will be quick to censure or expel a member whose public conduct is thought unacceptable. The member of a tennis club who persistently cheats will quickly find that this reputation dogs him both inside and outside the gates of the club.

The Internet does two very important things. First, it increases by an order of magnitude (or two, or three) the amount of information available to an individual. Second, it permits and even encourages the formation of groups entirely at the wish of the individual.

At first, the Internet could be seen as anarchic. By empowering the individual, libertarians hoped, the Internet would eat away the fabric of the State from the inside. In fact, the Internet can be used (or abused) by the State just as readily as by the individual. So far, it's difficult to say who is ahead!

Long term, though, the libertarians were probably right, in the sense that the Internet is ideally suited to the development of new models of cooperation between people, whereas its uses for the State are limited to the collection and dissemination of data, and interactions with citizens (financial and otherwise). It doesn't seem likely that the Internet will change the nature of the State (itself an expression of groupishness taken to a pathological extreme); however it will allow the State to become more effective in the exercise of its power over individuals. (See the US information collection systems; the UK's data retention law etc).

As noted, the Internet expands peoples' ability to associate by making it very easy for an individual to find other, like-minded individuals. It also allows an individual to pretend: perhaps this can be seen as the cyber-space equivalent of an amateur dramatic society, and that's just what it looks like in the case of virtual communities such as Everquest. The anonymity of the Internet can have bad results (middle-aged paedophiles pretending to be football-playing 15-year old girls), of course, but this may be a short-lived phenomenon (see evolution of the Internet, below).

Everquest and other well-developed virtual communities have sophisticated internal bodies of laws governing behaviour, with severe sanctions for those who break the laws. They also have 'real' economies, in which actual money can be made or lost through trading activity. Although the progenitors (and supervisors) of these games (as they were originally) are ambivalent about this commercial activity or in some cases opposed to it, the only way in which they'll stop it is to become like a State, and this is probably not what their players want. There is completely transparent competition on the Internet, and no external limits (yet) on how players should behave. In the case of E-Bay, coming from the opposite, commercial, direction, sub-economies have already sprung up, many of them 'groupish' in nature; E-Bay also has had to construct a complex body of law dealing with the behaviour of its users.

The insistent intrusion of 'trade' into Internet groups is no surprise to an evolutionary biologist: trade was one of the first characteristic activities of human hunter-gatherer groups once they began to settle down, or perhaps even before. The instinct to trade is very deeply rooted in the human psyche, and sits on very nearly the same level of the unconscious as does groupishness.

A digression: the Internet as an evolving organism; deception and reputation on the Internet.

The Internet is not being put forward as equivalent to a biological species; however there are characteristics of evolving organisms which seem to be universal, and in any event the actors on the Internet are people, identical in psychological terms to those people who participated in the early evolution of human society.

Deception is widely described among proto-social groupings of animals (eg monkeys) but it doesn't seem to have adverse consequences for the social position of the individual until the group acquires more sophistication. It is one weapon among many, that is all. But once the group starts to have internal organisation, and individuals have knowledge of each other's characteristics (roughly coeval with the use of language and the increase in brain size that led to the emergence of homo sapiens) then deception, if practised in the group, is rapidly noticed and punished by expulsion or withdrawal of group benefits (grooming, access to females, inclusion in trade). This is not to say that deception disappears from the range of human behaviours because of groups; of course not. What changes is that reputation acquires a positive value, and it can be lost by aberrant behaviour (aberrant from group norms). Deception becomes a crime of sorts, and sanctions are applied to those who practice it. As the group becomes larger, deception becomes easier to practice again, because you can't know everybody in a settled community of 3,000 individuals, with the difference that it has become established as wrong - because it is hurtful to the group. The groupish instinct or nature of the individual has many dimensions, and the wrongness of deception is one of them.

On the Internet, deception already takes many forms. We may include viruses, spam and impersonation as deceptive behaviour. They are getting so bad that some people give up the Internet as a bad job; but really it is just a kind of Black Death situation. Viruses, as in animals, have given rise to antibodies (patches or the equivalent) and doctors (Norton, etc). Some of the remedies are even called Doctor this or Doctor that. It is perhaps a bit early to say that viruses have been defeated; they never will be, either in people or in computers. But the vigilant, prepared individual (computer) should be able to defeat them in almost all cases.

Spam is 'free-loading' run riot. It is a kind of stealing, of the power of other people's computers, and of their time taken to sort through the incoming e-mails. Its effectivess in economic terms (for the sender) is wholly based on anonymity and the costless borrowing (stealing) of data and computer power, and loss of anonymity will rapidly prevent it. It is a special case of impersonation, in fact. The issue is how to deprive people on the Internet of the capacity to impersonate others, or at least to make impersonation so difficult to achieve, so easy to discover, and so costly when discovered, that there is no incentive to do it.

In human evolution this was achieved as regards deception by the emergence of groups, or more accurately, it was a by-product of the emergence of groups, viewed from a positive aspect of the development of individual reputation as a kind of badge of okayness. Technologically, it would not be that difficult to make the e-mail process completely transparent on the Internet, but the resulting loss of confidentiality and the extra powers given to regulators would make such a solution unacceptable to most people. Spam filters are a partial solution, but are very imperfect and are perhaps only a stop-gap measure. The solution may come instead from some kind of positive, associative process, in which a combination of certification, encryption and individual reputation will allow safe e-mail communication within groups of individuals, and between conforming groups. Identity theft would still be possible, but it would be easily detected and traced. The process of stealing an identity on the Internet requires something like a virus, to penetrate a group's or an individual's defences, and as seen above, that is a diminishing problem.

The starting point is the assertion that undesirable social behaviour stems from lack of a robust internalized moral structure and that this in turn results from the absence of group-delivered behavioural rules. In Jungian terms, the anti-social individual fails to share in a positive and effective collective unconscious.

If that starting point is accepted, then anything that can increase involvement in (the right type of) groups is going to increase the power of the individual's collective unconscious and decrease his tendency towards anti-social feelings or behaviour.

Of course this is why Lord Baden-Powell started the Boy Scouts; it is why Prince Charles started the Prince's Trust; and there are hundreds of other examples which go to prove that association is seen as a positive tool in building 'the right kind of personality'.

The real world, as it is called, is not going to deliver associative goods in the necessary quantities. On the contrary, people are ever more individualistic - and encouraged to be so by our culture - and the State will continue to squeeze out competitive deliverers of morality. The 'empowerment' of individuals will continue, with bad social results.

On the Internet, as much as in the 'real' world, desired behaviour is the result of moral rules which are taken on board, or at any rate, obeyed by the individual. Broadly speaking, there are three levels or channels through which these rules can be delivered, and these will apply just as much on the Internet as off it:

Unconscious imperatives (eg reciprocal altruism as developed by evolution);
Conscious imperatives (eg 'I believe in the 10 Commandments' and therefore I will not steal);
Externally imposed rules (eg by the State or a group to which one belongs).

Which of these channels is more effective, or or off the Internet? But first, another digression.

The problem of consciousness is unresolved. It's important to distinguish the cognitive activities that take place in the illuminated arena of awareness from that awareness itself. There is no a priori reason why these activities should have to take place within 'awareness' than outside it. Thinking to oneself, 'Ah, that is Jones and look, today he is growing a beard', is an activity that could perfectly well take place in an unconscious part of the brain, and probably does, alongside the fact that one is aware of it.

'What shall I do next?' is a slightly more difficult case; but this is a question that the brain is answering on all sorts of levels all the time. Again, what is the biological or evolutionary benefit of having awareness of the posing and/or answering of this question?

The relevance of this discussion to groups comes about because many evolutionary biologists believe that consciousness arose as a part of groupishness: because the complexity of the moment-to-moment decision process when surrounded by perhaps dozens of your peers, and needing to take into account a complex mass of moral precepts, both internalized and external, required a filtering process, and that consciousness is the most effective way of creating such a filter.

That doesn't sound particularly convincing; and most people would perhaps think that when a dog puts his head on one side and looks at you, deciding whether to bark or not, then he is probably going through some conscious decision process. OK, a dog is a social animal, not only living in groups in the wild, but also with social awareness of human behaviour. If the dog is conscious, then consciousness arose at a much earlier stage of evolution than the human kin-group.

Of course, consciousness in a dog is not necessarily the same as consciousness in a person; for that matter, consciousness in a 21st century human is not necessarily the same as consciousness in a 13th century human. Again, however, that is merely to say that the behavioural decision process in a 21st century human is subject to a different (wider?) set of influences than the process in a 13th century human, and the connection with consciousness is not evident on the surface.

It is tempting to suggest that the need for consciousness results from the need to incorporate external inputs or content with internal states and content. It's even possible that given the history of development of the brain, there wasn't an elegant way other than the invention of consciousness to create a decision forum in which external inputs could be married to internal inputs on a dynamic basis. It's not specially convincing, but if it were true, then how much more true it would become when those external inputs began to include the information in other people's brains, libraries and the media.

It's quite a problem, to decide whether to ask Jones (jokingly) if he has not got enough money to buy a razor, when you know that the leader of the group (Mrs Thatcher) has a prejudice against bearded men, and yet on the other hand you are competing with Jones for a ministerial post. On the other hand, how often have you felt a subconscious warning when about to make such a joke; and how often has it turned out that your subsconscious was right? The conscious is not a good decision forum, especially when multiple levels of intentionality are involved; the subconscious (meaning, the whole brain except for the tiny bit of it that deals in awareness) is just far better at synthesizing complex sets of information and developing appropriate behaviour.

It's certain however that the use of library or Internet content in a decision process is moderated by consciousness, and arguable that it has to be so (this would be a real change in human cognitive psychology, brought about by the development of the ESS). If a person sitting at breakfast and trying to decide whether to rob a bank at lunchtime needs to go to a library to look up the type of security precautions employed by banks, it would be a peculiar thing for him to suddenly say to his wife, 'I'm going to the library' without conscious awareness of why he was going to the library. It's logical for him to go to the library, and if his wife wasn't there, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary for him to be aware of the reason; but in practice he will be confronted throughout the day with similar situations in which he will have to make complex behavioural decisions involving other people.

Once more, it seems that consciousness is evolution's solution to the problem of mixing internal and external inputs in social situations. 'Awareness', like life, may remain a mystery, but the origin of self-awareness (= consciousness) is likely on these arguments to be quite far back, at the time when social groups first started to develop among animals, and long before even primates had evolved.

The argument is not going to be resolved here, but this discussion does perhaps set the background against which it's possible to answer the question about 'moral channels'.

Is it most effective for moral rules to be unconscious, conscious, or external?

It's likely that the set of moral precepts that developed along with the basic groupishness of humans are housed and delivered unconsciously. The feelings that demand fairness in relationships, that drive gossiping behaviour (gossip is an important component of groupedness), that make grooming important both to the giver and the receiver (grooming both in the physical sense but even more in the verbal sense), just to pick a few of the many dozens or probably hundreds of components of group behaviour, are not habitually experienced consciously.

On the other hand, sets of external moral precepts (eg the 10 Commandments) are clearly intended to operate primarily through consciousness, and externally. You can drill it into a child for 10 years at school, at home, and in church, that he shouldn't steal, and some of that may get fixed in the unconscious; but in the real world, society relies on the ever-presence of external prohibitions and sanctions to control behaviour. When the child, as a teenager, is in the off-licence and about to put the half-bottle of brandy into his coat pocket, he may be stopped by an ingrained sentiment, but it is much more likely that he will remember vividly the words he heard at sunday school, or the movie he saw last night in which the hero was caught stealing and shot by the sheriff. Again, there is a suggestion that the consciousness may be about marrying external input to internal states, although in this case the external input is remembered rather than directly perceived.

It seems to follow that only the most basic behavioural rules can be delivered through the collective unconscious, that is to say, as part of the moral baggage that travels with group membership. On the other hand, it isn't true that external rules are only experienced consciously. The rules pertaining to a particular group (as opposed to the rules which apply to all groups) may be delivered through the conscious, or at the minimum through observation of how group members behave, but they can be housed in and applied by the unconscious in most situations. Patriotism is an example of this; it's not a basic groupish requirement that you should die for your group at its request. But the group called a nation does by example and by explicit requirement demand that a member should be prepared to die in the interest of the group, in certain circumstances. This is so drilled into people by history books, movies and military training (external delivery of the rules) that when the awful moment comes they don't (except in rare cases) need to go through any conscious decision process. In fact, the group relies on the fact that they won't.

At the same time, it is clear that the typical individual's understanding of her position in society has evolved substantially in the last few hundred years. You could say that consciousness has enlarged to take in many more dimensions of a social being. At a stretch, you could say that whereas 500 years ago, for most people morality was largely unseen and unfelt at a conscious level, with behaviour being driven by unconscious structures, now a far larger proportion of people would be able to give a coherent account of their ethical positions. You could say that this amounts to the emergence of moral structures out of the unconscious into the conscious, accompanied by a reduction in the role of overtly external moral controls. However, you would also have to say that the moral structure which has emerged into consciousness is much weaker than its original unconscious forbear, and that people on the whole are much less inclined to accept external moral controls (even though the State is far more able to enforce them).

2. Ingrained groupishness carries with it a set of unconscious behaviours which are reinforced by membership of multiple groups and are mostly beneficial in social terms;

3. The moral structure of society is defined and delivered largely through the agency of groups;

4. The human unconscious and consciousness are both involved in applying moral precepts to social behaviour;

5. Use of the Internet tends to increase the 'groupedness' of individuals and through their acceptance of the moral precepts that are implied by group membership, both at the unconscious and the conscious level, their social behaviour tends to improve rather than otherwise.

For it to follow that the Internet will be a force for good, socially speaking, it needs to be true that individuals will increasingly use the Internet for social interaction and to develop group memberships, and that the Internet itself will continue to develop its potential as a means of communication without too much interference from the State.

It's a problem in society that the people who are most likely to understand published moral guidelines are the people who are the least likely to need them; or to put it the other way about, the people who are most likely to behave unsocially are the ones who are least likely to be confronted with moral guidelines in their daily lives. Game shows, Big Brother, football or baseball matches, the neighbourhood bar and the gutter press do not add up to a morally edifying diet.

One of the advantages of religion as a conduit for disseminating morality was that it encompassed all levels of society. It is arguable that the Internet will be similarly pervasive, and specifically through its encouragement to groupish activities and feelings.

(Following a table published by Harris Interactive in November, 2004, listing the top 10 uses of the Internet.)

1. To send or receive email. Of itself, the sending of an e-mail is not perhaps a groupish activity, but a high proportion of e-mails are presumably sent to family, friends, work colleagues and other members of groups to which a user belongs. This could be measured quite easily (and probably has been).

2. To do research for work or school. This is not at first sight a groupish activity; but in fact a surfer will very quickly be offered group membership as an aid to gaining in depth information. In order to explore this, let's imagine an accountant in the UK who has been asked by a client for information about Section 660 (the Inland Revenue's threat to assess additional tax on dividends paid to spouses in family businesses). Searching in Yahoo for Section 660, the first three relevant results (there are some US Section 660 references) are:

Prosperity 4, a membership organisation which offers financial benefits to its members;
Shout 99, which offers membership to UK freelancers, including financial benefits. The site makes much of the quasi moral nature of the organisation's struggle.
(**)
LesterCybersolve. This is an overtly commercial umbrella organisation for IT contractors, offering membership and various benefits. However it clearly sets out its stall as a group.
(**)

Notice that there are no pure information sources in the first three results; these are three groups. Further down the listing there are purer information sources, but you have to work to get to them.

3. To check on news updates, weather, etc. This is not a very groupish area, dominated by CNN, CBS, Fox, the BBC, and the like. However, a Yahoo search for 'weather news' brings up a 'sponsored link' at the top right to Parmedia, a membership news blog, which has an extensive Compact setting out the standards members are expected to adhere to.

4. To get information about a hobby or special interest. Randomly picking 'greyhound racing' as a search term on Yahoo, we are given three national greyhound racing associations in the top ten search results. The first in order of these is the American Greyhound Racing Association. It offers membership, with access to a range of information and benefits, and it has a Code of Conduct for its members.

This Code is representative of the hundreds of thousands of affiliation groups that exist on the Internet, and it is very clear that this group sets out desired behaviours among its members that have quite strong moral overtones. There is also a connection to relevant legislation, an appeal to fight against other, negatively-portrayed groups, and a call for financial support. There is no mention of trading; but this is a quasi-official body, and likely to frown on commercial activity.

This was a completely random example; any search term whatever with hobby or interest relevance is extremely likely to generate group membership invitations high up in the search results.

5. To gather information about products and services. Although there are possibilities for groupish relationships in the direct supplier/customer relationship, they are not widespread. The first result, Xerox, doesn't have a membership program, although there is a Channel Partners membership program for resellers, which is a bit groupish. However, a further search for Xerox Computer Printers is more fruitful: the first listing is for BizRate, a shopping search engine with a membership program which gives access to members' product reviews and has a forum-like feature. A search for 'Xerox users forum', something that a prospective purchaser might well undertake, yields a number of user forums. The first, very small, is www.printerscannercopier.com; the second is printer-review.com, which was quite active in 2003, but now looks quiet; the third listing is for Print-Planet.com, which is part of E-Communities, an extensive series of computer user groups which requires a substantial amount of personal and professional information before admitting members. It has a long user agreement.

Members can send e-mails and other messsages ('posts') to their fellow members, which can have trading or commercial content, within limitations. (See notes above about how the Internet may protect itself against impersonation and spam in future; this is an example of how it begins to happen.)

It's probably unnecessary to go on. Any use of the Internet comes up against user groups, forums, communities etc in short order; and they normally have sets of rules with more or less ethical content which seek to control the behaviour of members.

Curiously, the Harris poll didn't list - and perhaps didn't ask about - sex or gaming, which are regularly reported to be the two main uses of the Internet. Both of them no doubt have plentiful clubs, membership priviliges, forums, etc; but perhaps the most interesting aspect of gaming, loosely interpreted, from a groupish point of view, is to be found in the 'lifestyle' or virtual reality sites previously mentioned.

secondlife.com, a subscription membership service. Secondlife's 'Community Standards' are a good sample of virtual world 'ethical codes'.

With fairly minor adaptions, it would do very well for a code of social ethics under which most 'real-world' inhabitants would be only too happy to live their lives!

An educational 'virtual reality' directory with sixty entries;
A list of about 100 commercially available software 'virtual reality' packages;
Worlds.com - an enabler of virtual reality worlds;
Lots of books on how virtual reality is going to transform society . . .;
A multitude of virtual reality gaming forums;
Cybertown.com, a vitual reality city environment.

(**)

As it happens, this search didn't bring up Everquest, which is an industry in itself, as a search on the word will quickly show; and it has rivals.

It's eventually necessary to provide a more or less scientific basis for the various assertions made above about the existence and effects of groupishness on the Internet.

It's possible to test the development of people's groupishness (in terms of the number of groups they belong to and the time they spend in them) by comparing people without Internet experience with (a) people who have been on the Internet for say 2 years and (b) people who have been on the Internet for say 5 years. The next step would be to find some objective measure of their social integration. It's another thing to prove causation, of course.

Initial searches aimed at measuring the usage of VR sites on the Internet are very unpromising!

To begin with, we need to exclude changes to the existing human gene pool. It is possible, even highly probable that the gene pool is still evolving, and even possible that the Internet could play a role in that evolution; but it is a subject that is impossibly hard to address, especially in advance. It is a given, therefore, at least during the time-span of changes that may be brought on by the Internet and that we have some faint chance of predicting (say, the next 100 years) that individuals will continue to be born and grow with the full, existing cognitive equipment that we are familiar with.

Beyond that, there are social and cultural aspects of human life which have developed as features of groups writ small or large, from the hunter-gatherer band to the nation of China, and these, not being determined genetically, are capable of change. The word evolution is often applied to such changes, partly because no-one is quite sure where the gene-pool leaves off and society begins, and partly because new societal forms and behaviours do indeed evolve in the sense that the fittest of them survive. In this discussion, it must be understood that the word 'evolve' is not used to imply Darwinian adaptation of the gene-pool, but to mean selection of the most adaptive social techniques, and by all means many of these will be in our heads. Darwin was perfectly aware of this distinction, and comfortable with it.

What other limiting assumptions can be made about the global and social environment in which the Internet will have its impact? That's an impossible question, also, but an exploration of the effect of the Internet has to make some assumptions if the canvas is not to be too hopelessly wide.

The assumptions made for this particular exploration are to be thought of as applying to the period 2020 - 2050. They may be called Utopian, or nightmarish, depending on where you are coming from! The intention is to make things simple; no doubt they will be different, but at least as explorers of the future Internet we won't be distracted by irrelevancies.

Born Hong Kong, 2015, of a Russo-Chinese mother and a British father. Ivan is 25 and still lives in Hong Kong with his parents.

7 am. Ivan's wife, Lily wakes him. In fact Lily is visiting her family in Beijing but her holographic presence in real time allows her to be present. Alternatively, and away from the holographic 'hotspot', Lily could have chosen to 'inhabit' the couple's personal assistant (PRA), in real time or automatically (in which case the encounter could be played back later on demand).

Most people also choose to relate to groups of others rather than just to one, during such encounters - although certain subjects may be restricted to sub-groups, or, as in the present case, to just one pair of individuals. After a few minutes, Ivan and Lily switch from the pair to their family group, which currently has 11 members, in order to discuss caring arrangements for Lily's grandmother, who is in a nursing home in London.

8 am. After breakfast, Ivan attends a lecture as part of his post-graduate course in cognitive informatics. He has moved to his living room and for the lecture chooses to wear an outfit copied (by the PRA) from last night's talk show. Of course, Ivan is actually still in his shorts. His presence at the lecture is delivered by the PRA, as is the case for the other 20 or so students, and the lecturer.

After the lecture, which had been pre-scheduled as part of the course, Ivan remained in the virtual world of the institute socializing with other students in his group. He also spent time in the institute's library, doing some research, had a private consultation with his tutor, and finally made some contributions to his group's thesis-project.

Ivan's institute (the Global Institute for Psycho-Sciences or GIPS) doesn't of course have any presence in the physical world. As a private body, it competes against its peers for funding from its students or from state scholarships.

GIPS is run under a highly elaborated set of rules (laws) which deal with all aspects of academic and student life. These laws were developed and are maintained by local representative bodies (groups) of academics, administrators and students, but operate within a global standard-setting structure to ensure compatibility between courses and academic results.

By 12 noon, Ivan's academic session is finished. He plans to play tennis and have lunch with a friend he met through a Google tennis group (Hong Kong branch). Tennis as a game hasn't changed much since 2005, but tennis clubs nowadays are strictly virtual. The courts themselves are operated as commercial facilities, and when you want to have a game, your PDA will find you the ideal venue and book and pay for it.

After lunch, Ivan plans to . . . well, perhaps it's enough already. All of his activities so far during the day have been associated with group activity, entirely through his own choice, and the groups he has worked or played with have been small, between 8 and 150, which corresponds pretty much to the range of group sizes that early humans encountered, and in which they acquired their groupish nature.

Another notable characteristic of Ivan's life with and through private groups is that the State is nowhere involved in setting or enforcing the rules. In 2040 there certainly still are areas of life in which the State prescribes and enforces the rules, but the 21st century has seen a gradual shrinkage of such areas, as people have come to realise that most human activity is better organised at the local, group level rather than by the over-arching State.

In 2040 it is widely supposed that future human evolution at the biological level will be technology-driven. Already of course there is no part of the body which cannot be replaced or improved by a bionic device; and some human faculties are routinely enhanced by implants shortly after birth, hearing is the most obvious example with major improvements in the perceived frequency range and spatial discrimination. Direct manipulation of the genome has removed the great majority of genetically-transmitted diseases; and babies are 'designed' to an extent which would have seemed unacceptable even 20 years ago.

Cognitive faculties have also been enhanced in a real, genetic sense by manipulation of the genome, and are further sharpened by appropriate drug therapies, although these remain controversial. But the most obvious sense in which the human psyche has evolved, and continues to evolve, while not genetic, is through the enormous expansion of individual and group cognitive power made possible by better communication and increased access to knowledge, both largely due to the Internet.