Speculative fiction .. or religion? Because if there were some way we could access the sum total of all human experience, wouldn't that method be as close to "God" as it was ever described?
One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..
To what extent does mass+social media create collective subgroups of consciousness? What's the decay curve of a subgroup and how do subgroups compete, fork, merge or decay?
How do persistent records (oral memories, written records, national holidays, memorials, digital footprints, media archives, censorship) feed back into subgroups of collective consciousness?
How can collective consciousness be measured, monetized, directed, encouraged, suppressed, or otherwise manipulated for specific purposes, within a specific bounded timeframe of a single
hour or day?
How do time zones affect the "nature/flavor" of consciousness in each hour, as populations sleep and wake and work and rest and ...?
Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...