Outsourcing Consciousness

David Bowie was right.

Social networks aren't a tool. They are an alien force that transforms human consciousness.

Shakespeare invented the human by inventing a device which spoke the language of consciousness:

Story.

There are a lot of ways to define a "story."

But to understand how story interacts with human consciousness requires us to be more specific.

Man's road to becoming a storyteller began with a single step.

That step kicked off millions of years of co-evolution of the human brain, society, language - and our relationship with story.

If we care about the influence of social networks on our minds, why are we talking about bipedalism and the 8 million year cycle of co-evolution it kicked off?

Because it defined how our young were parented, how we taught them, and what they were exposed to. Because it changed how our symbolic brains evolved.

Our brains evolved to tell stories before they evolved to speak.

This has fundamental implications for our susceptibility to communication in the networked age.

Humans evolved to acquire symbols as quickly as possible.

Language and storytelling evolved to be acquirable as easily as possible.

That's why our tales spin us.