This is a good read. Jaron Lanier is a notable commentator on edgy, high-tech issues.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html

Daniel, are you the one who coined the expression "hive mind"?

I did more than my fair share toward popularizing the term as it applies to Wikipedia, but I don't know if I was the first to use it in reference to Wikipedia. In any case, I hereby release it to the public domain.

It's nice to see it catch on as a description of all this Web 2.0 social networking stuff in general. Wikipedia is merely one of many. It's on the cutting edge of the phenomenon, like some huge Borg cube at warp speed.

I like Jason Lanier's observation about how we now have the aggregators of the aggregators -- from blogs written by people with real names, to blogs written by screen names, to portals of blog stuff, to portals of the portals, etc. I also like his comments about how society doesn't get any smarter from all this stuff. It's the individual journalists who pursue a story who contribute most to social progress.

There's no room for such people at Wikipedia, of course. They're called kooks, zealots, trolls, and they get reverted and banned. NOR (No Original Research) may as well be LOSS (Let's Only Stay Stupid). And the flip side is that if an individual comes along who doesn't want a biography in Wikipedia, they tell him that "resistance is futile." That's what Canderson7 said about my objections to Wikipedia's bio on me, which was started by SlimVirgin.

Very good article.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc.../TheBlog?m=2697

EVER SINCE musician, writer, and technological visionary Jaron Lanier coined the term ''virtual reality" in the early 1980s, and headed up efforts to implement the idea, he's been a member of the digerati in excellent standing. But he's an anxious member, known to raise alarms about just those big ideas and grand ambitions of the computer revolution that happen to ...

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...th_jaron_lanier

Jaron Lanier's essay can be found here, in it's original location:

Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

Steven Levy's commentary, "Poking a stick into the hive mind," came through the RSS feed before the essay itself did:



Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc.../site/newsweek/

Hopefully this should clear up any confusion. [~Somey]

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



http://aine.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/16/...ne-collectivism

Jaron Lanier is a man of many talents—virtual-reality pioneer, New Age composer, visual artist and artificial-intelligence scientist.



http://aine.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/16/...o-the-hive-mind

From the article: Jaron Lanier is certainly right to look at the downsides of collective action. It's not a revolution if nobody loses, and in this case, expertise and iconoclasm are both relegated by some forms of group activity.



http://marilynl.newsvine.com/_news/2006/09...-digital-maoism

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



http://aine.newsvine.com/_news/1901/12/13/...ne-collectivism

From the article: Jaron Lanier is certainly right to look at the downsides of collective action. It's not a revolution if nobody loses, and in this case, expertise and iconoclasm are both relegated by some forms of group activity.



http://marilynl.newsvine.com/_news/2006/09...-digital-maoism