We already know that Social media has the ability to transform social structures by empowering individuals to cohesive action. The hive mind disseminates information at the speed of Tweet and the collective consciousness informs the actions of the drones who are a part of the collective.

In this system, the collective consciousness, rather than being a single entity, represents the collective hopes, desires, dreams  and aspirations of the masses. This Hive mind also evolves as new frameworks are established, giving the individuals more tools to engage their reality.

this evolution is based, not surprisingly, on Language.

We depend on language to express ourselves and to  learn, discover and process infomation from the collective.

Imagine then, given the speed of transformation now, with the 140 character limit on twitter. Imagine  if each Tweet-er  had 140 words to express what they wanted to say, and that those 140 characters are read as easily as a short sentence. How would that change the speed of evolution?

Well, Welcome to the Chinese Social Media Landscape.

In a previous post, we discussed how weibo has a character limit of 140 characters. It seems arbitrary, and follows the twitter character count. however, 140 characters is equivalent to a paragraph in English due to the pictographic nature of the Chinese language and how meaning is derived.

So we have increasingly connected society, with the largest population in the world, speaking a common language, one that is able to communicate so much more efficiently than with our romanized alphabet.

What bearing does that have on the future of humanity?

Stay tuned.