I would love to paraphrase what James discusses but I'm afraid I will do so horribly and let all substance of the talk escape... Here is the transcript of the video. It's an interesting read! Trust me!
If you hate reading you can follow along here
"But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it.
Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on.
So, that's the positive side of it. We are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped.
But there is a dark side to this- One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things -- that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is.
But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact -- and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon.
Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values. So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link."
He then continues on with the ant colony:
"the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions.
They're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing.
But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule -- just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.
And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear -- is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die."
Beautiful.
This is exactly how I was feeling about 4 blog posts ago. Sometimes I feel like our cell phones, and media in general, encapsulate us and we just feed off of whatever is being thrown at us. Yes, you have the power to put your device down, but knowledge is very addicting. The speed of information keeps users on edge. Yes, I'm guilty of being internet stricken, but the problem is that I see it spreading at an unhealthy pace. I see small children on cell phones, tablets, etc., who knows what kind of information they're taking in. Whenever I have a moment of free time, chances are I'm looking at my phone. I look at my phone even after looking at my phone 5 minutes before! Is this phenomena getting out of hand?
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