Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Jaron Lanier takes collaborative web sites to task in Digital Maoism. What he seems to be saying is that collective information sites leave out individuals, and by extension the personality and responsibility for the information. It’s easy to come up with collective crap. And it’s deluded to think that an anomous collective automatically comes up with the widest choices of those available. It’s easy for a collective to go nuts, since there’s seemingly not one to take responsibility. Lanier cites Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools mention of popurls.com as an example of a site letting us observe what Kelly calls hive mind in action. Lanier ain’t buying it: 

• But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

But Lanier keeps coming back to what seems a pet bugaboo in the essay: Wikipedia. It seems wikipedia’s contributors labeled Lanier a film director, though he made a single film that he’s not proud of. And when he tries to set the record straight, the great unwashed collection of wikipedia contributors are there to reinsert the film director label. Lanier doesn’t like that, and who can really blame him.

Is wikipedia a mega collection of anonymous contributions bubbling up into an unaccountable mass of information and misinformation that you can’t distinguish between? In Growing Wikipedia Refines Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy - New York Times, founder Jimmy Wales takes exception, though there is no mention of the Lanier essay in the Times article. Perhaps the collective is not so mass and anonymous after all:

• The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
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• “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Mr. Wales said. “But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community.”

So maybe the collective isn’t so vast after all, at least as far as Wikipedia is concerned. And a visit just now to Lanier’s listing failed to mention the film director bit.  

Whatever. But I think Lanier does have a point about the hive’s wisdom or lack thereof. The value I see in aggregators and such is the novelty they can introduce, not in the consensus they can sometimes seem to spout. There might actually be a sense of nonsense there.

But I think you have to forgo the front page of such sites and subscribe to the feeds that feature raw submissions, before they go through the aggregating process. Granted, there’s a lot of crap in them, but sometimes a gem worth following turns up. In fact, if memory serves correctly, that’s how I came up Lanier’s essay in the first place.