My Response to Cory Doctorow’s response to Lanier’s response to wikipedia
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In his response, Doctorow said:
“We’re bad futurists, we humans. We’re bad at predicting what will be important and useful tomorrow. We think the telephone will be best used to bring opera to America’s living rooms. We set out nobly to make TV into an educational medium.“
He brings up a good point. The internet was created for military purposes and look what it has become today. In the same way, wikipedia was created to be a continuously updated, free, user updated encyclopedia (according to wiki) yet it is being thought of as a hive mind or the next step for collective knowledge. I think that Lanier is looking at wikipedia a little bit too much on the surface when he thinks that the individual mind will be lost in a collective, hive mind (the zerg from starcraft comes to mind..im a nerd). Clay Shirky points out, in his response, that beneath the surface, wikipedia is still run and managed by administrators; that is not just anyone can go in and change an entry, it has to be approved and etc first. Doctorow also mentions this when he talks about the gatekeepers to different mediums. These people keep things on track and keep wikipedia from running rampant with rediculous facts. Otherwise, wikipedia could turn into something like the urban dictionary which is basically a big crack at ebonics. Another way Doctorow claims that wikipedia moves away from a true hive mind is that there are “those “history” and “discuss” pages hanging off of every entry” where people challenge and discuss the entries. Even the Borg from star trek had individual minds within the collective. I’m not too worried about wikipedia stealing my individuality.
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