m8ta
You are not authenticated, login. |
|
{883} | ||
Response to Jonah Lehrer's The Web and the Wisdom of Crowds: Lehrer is right on one thing: culture. We're all consuming similar things (e.g. Rebecca Black) via the strong positive feedback of sharing things that you like, liking things that you share, and becoming more like the things that are shared with you. Will this lead to a cultural convergence, or stable n-ary system? To early to tell, but probably not: likely this is nothing new. Would you expect music to collapse to a single genre? No way. Sure, there will be pop culture via the mechanisms Lehrer suggests, but meanwhile there is too much to explore, and we like novelty too much. Regarding decision making through stochastic averaging as implemented in democracy, I have to agree with John Hawk here. The growing availability of knowledge, news, and other opinions should be a good thing. This ought to be more than enough to counteract the problem of everyone reading say the NYTimes instead of many varied local newspapers; there should be no impoverishment of opinion. Furthermore, we read blogs (like Lehrer's) which have to compete increasingly honestly in the attention economy. The cost of redirecting our attention has gone from that of a subscription to free. Plus, this attention economy ties communication to reality at more points - each reader, as opposed to each publisher, is partially responsible for information amplification and dissemination. (I mean I just published this damn thing and almost zero cost - is that not a great thing?) |