Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

Pg. 57

Contemporary man is fortunate to have a tool that makes him aware of his own enculturation and thus he enjoys greater psychic freedom than his ancestors. This tool is what Teilhard de Chardin has called the noosphere, the film of organized intelligence that encircles the planet, superposed on the living layer of the biosphere and the lifeless layer of inorganic material, the lithosphere. The minds of three-and-a-half-billion humans—twenty-five percent of all humans who ever lived—currently nourish the noosphere; distributed around the globe by the intermedia network, it becomes a new "technology" that may prove to be one of the most powerful tools in man's history