Our Collective Consciousness
zeit·geist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-“gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.
I stumbled onto Google Zeitgeist tonight. Have you seen it? It’s a statistical compendium of all of the searches on Google in any given year. They rank words, translations, ideas and concepts, celebrities, sports — you name it. They also separate the data by country. It’s fascinating.
Check out the “Year-end Zeitgeist,” which has data from 2008 all the way back to 2001.
With our minds preoccupied with so many things these days — the good, bad and ugly — it was interesting to see what we were thinking about in 2008. Not surprisingly, the economy was ranked way up there. Interestingly, it seems that trends for searches using the words “marketing” or “advertising” have been in a steady (and eerily patterned) decline since 2004.
Who knows what 2009 will hold? As for me, I am going to dwell on the extraordinarily positive, so that the “collective consciousness” will feel a bit of an uptick. As I’ve said before, there’s too much irrational pessimism (I prefer irrational exuberance).
Think happy thoughts. Search happy terms. Do it with me. Ommmmm…
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“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7)
