(((This contrarian article by Jaron Lanier is really good.
As a matter of principle, I ought to read this again and again
until the Web 2.0 fever passes.)))
(((I completely agree with Jaron that terms like
"collective intelligence" and "hive mind" have the
distressing new-agey tang of "Artificial Intelligence."
I'm not sure I can agree that "the hive-mind is stupid
and boring." I'm thinking that might be better phrased
as "the hive-mind is stupid, and it bores Jaron Lanier."
Because it might well be that the hive-mind is indeed stupid,
and yet much more fun and entertaining than television,
movies, and newspapers, and that's enough to put
the cat among the pigeons, right there.)))
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
When Lanier cares enough to write it, you oughta care enough to read it
'There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
'The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
'These Web-based designs assumed that value would flow from people. It was still clear, in all such designs, that the Web was made of people, and that ultimately value always came from connecting with real humans.
'Even Google by itself (as it stands today) isn't Meta enough to be a problem. One layer of page ranking is hardly a threat to authorship, but an accumulation of many layers can create a meaningless murk, and that is another matter.
'In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.'
etc etc huh I never thought of it that way etc etc
