The hazards of not distinguishing
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006I have to say that I am in two minds about Jaron Lanier’s Digital Maoism essay. On one hand the serious open discussion of good and bad things about Wikipedia is overdue and the other hand I believe he makes a fundamental mistake. Calling Wikipedia a result of the hive mind is a simplification that you meet in main stream media all the time, which I suspect has lead certain people to think that Wikipedia is some kind of magic pixie dust and if you don’t believe this you then something must be wrong with you.
The important distinction that gets lost here is between collectivism and collective action. Wikipedia is not the average result of the efforts of everyone who ever typed www.wikipedia.org into their browser, but rather the work of a dedicated relatively small core of people empowered by technology that have taken the “collective action” to build a free online encyclopedia. Interestingly Lanier states the distinction well this himself, but fails to apply it:
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.