You mean collective unconscious, right? An individual's consciousness is that particular person's personality, experience, etc. If you go deeper into the unconscious, it becomes more broad and more of mankind's shared experiences and this is where archetypes resonate. Fairly abstract, so it's hard to explain in a paragraph. I would read Wikipedia's Carl Jung entry for a crash course.

I've also heard the theory that the Internet is mankind's collective unconscious.

Possibly he does means collective conciousness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_consciousness

As I understood it's sort of like a meme, or similar ideas, that is when some concept has entered into common enough usage that it means something is, within a group of individuals, presumed to be common knowledge. At that point it has entered into the collective conciousness.

So, for instance, the desctruction of the World Trade Center s, New York on September 11th 2001 can be stated as an event that has entered the collective conciousness of a large group of people.

Make sense?

I'm reading a book right now 'The Tipping Point' which is related. About the mechanisms ideas use to go from a very small group of people to mass consciousness.

This is an excerpt from the book by Ken Keyes, jr. "The Hundredth Monkey."

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new wayand they taught their mothers too.

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshimam onkeys were washing sweet potatoes -- the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

THEN IT HAPPENED! By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice: A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea...Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes. Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may vary, this Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these people.

But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

There's an explanation for the magic number 100, or 150 in 'The Tipping Point'. I haven't finished it yet, but there are 3 types of people who have the capability to spread an idea from the fringes to the masses:

1) Extremely well-connected, outgoing people who have lots and lots of aquaintances (everybody knows these types of people; people who everyone seems to know)

2) People that are data mavens - they know everything about certain fields and people come to them for advice and opinions and take what they say seriously

3) Salesmen - not neccessarily by profession, but people who are gifted at pitching ideas and generating enthusiasm.

I guess the point is once the number of people supporting an idea reaches 150, that is statistically likely to have one or more of the 3 types listed above in that group, who allow an idea to reach critical mass.

i think it means a mass conscousness that is a result from a certain thought that's created by someone or some group and it becomes a wider knowledge and people then tends to think it as the truth or have the same perception of the thing.
for example :
like visual symbols, traffic lights. that red means stop, green mean go. it becomes a visual language that everyone had. it becomes the common knowledge.
but i might be wrong though :p

Perhaps, like music, its a consciousness that we all relate to. For me its, tuning off all electronoc media for a week and still being in touch with you all.

W

I was thinking, SHOWstudio's updated website is a great example of collective conciousness. In the way that it fuels connection and community.

BTW: Dorian, I think you did an amazing job on the updated site. From what little I understand about designing the front and back end of websites, I could only imagine the complex nature of that architecture.

Collective conciousness=Nice to get to know you.

W