Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer, and YouTube

Recently I have been checking out a lot of Robert B. Sawyer's books from the library - this is the latest.

There's a lot here in the plot to try to summarize (and it's probably summarized best on Sawyer's site) but I'm thinking about it in conjunction with YouTube because of the descriptions of a "human overmind" in the book.

Heather Davis, a psychologist, has been trying to decipher a set of radio messages from our neighbors in Alpha Centauri (yeah, this is kind of like Contact, isn't it.)
They turn out to be the plans for building a Hypercube, a four-dimensional cube, also often called a tesseract.
(Sidebar - I remember how amazed I was when I first read the word tesseract somewhere other than in Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I naiively thought she had made up the word, so it was quite mindblowing to think that at least the concept existed, if not the mode of travel used in the book).


And Heather eventually gets this device built (its first form is as an unfolded hypercube that only stays rigid while under sunlight). After she gets inside one of the cubes, it folds itself up, disappears, and Heather inside can actually see and access the "overmind" of all humanity - "Neckering" or linking to different people through each other.

Kind of uber six degrees of separation, as she finds her husband's mind by first finding the prime minister of Canada and then working her way back down.
It's really a mind-blowing concept, but especially the way Sawyer describes it, with Heather getting caught up in historical figures' minds, etc, not all that different from websearching in process, but amazing to think of actually being able to look out through someone else's eyes and know what they're thinking (and all they have thought about before).

And then I came back to the computer, where YouTube was up (I was looking at a WoW machima movie earlier).
On one of the popular lists I find this series of videos from a man named Martin, who apparently has now passed away (the most recent video is from his wife).
I hadn't thought of YouTube as much as a "video journal" or archive medium, on top of all the Steven Colbert clips, but this really makes it an accessible (buy cheap webcam, get youTube account and net access) venue for people to tell their stories (and get them heard by more potential viewers in a more immediate way than even blogging does)

The end of the book calls out more hopeful uses for the overmind - Heather ends up being the ambassador for the human overmind when the Alpha Centauri overmind comes calling, which leads overall to greater peace in the world, less selfishness, etc. (Why would the human race as a whole feel empathy or a sense of community if it thinks humans are the only ones in the universe...)
There's so much dreck in YouTube that I'm definitely not saying that it's the path to all human understanding, but certainly it is contributing to the "small world" feeling.
I just did a search for Iraqi videos on YouTube. It appears most are being made by Americans in Iraq, instead of Iraqis themselves or else they are just spoofs.... but here's a kid singing.

Buy on Amazon!