"Avatar" the movie, vs Quantum Darwinism

In Viral Loop, Adam Penenburg does a nice job of describing a few people(who are representative of 1000’s more) who have made a conscious decision to lives their lives as much as possible online. These folks stalk Wifi hot-spots like predators seeking prey(or maybe more like Vegans seeking whole grains?). They feel incomplete unless they are jacked-in to their digital counter-world. It is suggested by Penenburg that for these types of people, digital-only experiences, including music and relationships, have displaced “live” encounters as that person’s “new reality”. Or in my words “Preferred Reality”. So is the sign of things to come? Will the human race rapidly become “avatar like” with a perfect system of digital connectedness closing the gap between everyone and everything? Will augmented reality + Ning + Google + Twitter et all form the digitized neural-net that will forever bind us all together into an inseparable and unionized collective of assimilated consciousness? Mmmm, probably not.
I could now talk about things like Quantum Darwinism, but seems that I can get in trouble when I mention how biology tends to drive sociology, and that reality is formed via long strings of probabilities and decision trees. My point is this: sure the movie Avatar looks cool. Tron and the Matrix were cool too. “1984” was also cool. So, raise your hand if you believe that information/communication aggregation as manifested in today’s social media/devices is the beginning of an avatar-like existence…I see a lot of hands out there. So let me ask you this: Pick an example from human history that provides evidence of the indelible evolution of our social consciousness. Great, Everybody have an example? Now ask yourself this: In your example, does this example of “social consciousness evolution” require active administration by the person, or has it become reflexive/instinctually “programmed such that this evolutionary example could not be rapidly reversed by an event that happens to the person? What happened to your example?
Why should be care? In the same way that humans are able to construct technology that could cause our complete physical destruction, we are also able to construct technology that presents itself as Faux Evolution, or Fauvolution. What the heck is that? It’s a thin veneer of human-produced advancement that from 50,000 feet makes it appear that we have evolved ourselves as a race of humans. Trouble is, our social consciousness has not evolved(in the hard-wired sense) in any discernable way for an awfully long time. Take a human, put them in adverse conditions, and you will see social regression in effect like a freight train until we are once again “nasty, brutish, and short”.
The concept of an Avatar-like neural net scares me more than the Google phone. Why? Because we mistakenly believe that total connectedness is what we want. Where in fact, we need disconnectedness in the same way that we need sleep. Why have we not figured this out yet? Because no one has enabled scalable and sustainable “immersive connectedness”.
Avatar presents as just another probabilistic outcome of our social evolution, which in my opinion, would require a few thousand(million?) more years to become an indelible(as in irreversible) part of human nature. And before that happens, we will continue to do what we have always done….