Doug Rushkoff. Smart guy. He actually teaches a class here at NYU. I actually became a fan of his writing when i found this interview with him and Julia Wertz, so i was relieved when i read his response to Lanier and discover that he doesn’t share the impending doom attitude towards wikipedia as Lanier.
Rushkoff believes that, yes, the hive mind or collective thinking can work out negatively, and putting ones faith in that sort of collective is unpredictable, or in other words, any type of blind faith can result in one getting burned. However, it seems doubtful that wikipedia or a similar mediated social platform would be the impetus for remaking the social order.
First off, we can’t go on pretending that even our favorite disintermediation efforts are revolutions in any real sense of the word. Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite.
Though Rushkoff, much like Lanier, questions the faith that users put into user-created databases such as wikipedia, there is no reason to treat them as dangerous to our society and academia. He sees the fact that modern user created databases rely more on links than on original content and scholarly material, but sees this as being influenced by the past of western culture. It isn’t wikipedias fault that this is the way we organize things. I personally do not see the issue here. Original content is still being written and provided somewhere. I see nothign but positives of a collective group keeping watch over each other and making all this information more accessable and easier to access for the common user. While i usually end up double checking the information i find on wikipedia for accuracy, i find the colelciton of related materials the community posts to be an invaluable asset.
in his response, Rushkoff points out academic discoveries are usually the work of collective groups utilizing each others research and findings as springboards for their own endeavors. Ownership of these ideas is just about ego. The way wikipedia collects information is due to the very nature of the computing itself. He states that it is a a platform used for drawing connections between things, not creating them. And the behavior which can come from collective action, while not necessarily revolutionizing society online, can be utilized in the real world for social change. This is a good point and we see it often. Many groups use the internet to collect resources, point members to information and assemble members for action in the real world.
The whole system of online collectives works off a series of checks and balances. The community manages to right its own wrongs. We saw this first hand in last travelogues post on wikipedia. Within minutes of entering false information, someone corrected the mistake and righted the wikipedia article. I think there is enough drive in enough people to keep this system in check and want to help further the spread, or at least accessibility of information online. These individuals are not going meta, but are looking to be connected to each other. The internet is a place that fosters communication. Wikipedia is an online community that puts strangers in contact with each other for the sake of spreading information, and making information available to the masses. While Lanier looks at these databases as trying to lose all aspects of humanity to be meta i see the opposite. People are striving to be connected and collaborate.
