The Mob Mind of the Web
By way of Stephen Levy’s Newsweek article I discovered Jaron Lanier’s essay titled Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. Below is a portion of Lanier’s opening salvo in which he says that certain aspects of Wikipedia are a symptom of a larger problem.
No, 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 have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
It prints out to eleven pages of single spaced text. Read it in one sitting if you have the time, but expect to come back to it as you unpack and digest the author’s thesis. There are a lot of ideas presented in the essay, some of which could be topics on their own. One that struck me was what Lanier said about how cloned information leads to a loss of flavor. He talk about the “anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia” and contrasts it to personal web pages and journals which have a text authenticating voice and personality that Wikipedia lacks.
While not the point of the passage, I find myself chasing down a rabbit hole thinking about the level of originality in the blogosphere and to what extent I/we/others are regurgitating information rather than generating new ideas and perspectives? Is my blogging a flavor enhancer, or does it lack saltiness?
Just a question: Isn’t education and the education system based on this theory of collectivism?
I mean, isn’t it one group (elders) telling another group (students) what to study?
How is that different than collectivism. We just regurgitate new material over and over though education, stigmatizing any creativity and originality, while a group of people decide what we should and shouldn’t learn.
How is that not the same thing?
There is definitely a “regurgitation” aspect in education…it is those kids in your class who just followed the set instructions for completing their homework assignments, as well as cramming and memorizing information; so that they could regurgitate it for their exams. The problem with that, the same with eating, is that sort of meal doesn’t give you any nutritional benefit. It may sustain you enough to get through high school or college, but have you really learned any critical thinking or problem solving skills? How many times have you or I done that only to quickly forget what we supposedly learned?
I see the same patterns in the workplace. I’ve trained dozens of people and the ones who always fail are those who are looking for a formulaic approach to doing their jobs. Those who can analyze situations and make decisions on their own are those who excel.
The question you may or may not be inferring is where the fault lies…with the individual or the institution? The short answer is both
, but I say that because I think there is a lot of complexity driving medicore education outcomes.
I agree and disagree at the same time.
On the one hand, education – in modern times – is soley looked at by students as getting As. Why? Because As get a good GPA. A good GPA gets a good job. As much as I would like to believe that employers look for those who have refined critical thinking skills or come up with creative or original things, I just don’t see any proof to back it up.
Thus, a “regurgitation” effect is applied by students in an effort to get a good GPA to get a good job. If it’s different, in your eyes, please let me know.
Thus, I think the blame lies soley within the institution because of the parameters it puts around itself. GPA = Job Level. That parameter limits the system to a “regurgitation” system – at least in my eyes.
My additional thought, though I didn’t clarify, was that isn’t the basic premise of teachers teaching students based on collective thought? Or as the author puts it “the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force”?
That is, if he argues Wikipedia is doomed because “the collective is all-wise” then isn’t education doomed for the same reason? Isn’t a collective group (of scholars) deciding – often interpreting – what is and isn’t taught; what is and isn’t fact?
I just don’t see how this is any different (the collective nature) than education itself. Is that more clear?
Thanks for the clarification. I think see what you’re meaning, but I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison to say that education is the same as the Wiki concept, which is essentially encyclopedia by committee. Is the classroom education by committee? Can’t a teacher pick one text book over another based on what he/she knows about the authors or publisher? Can he/she not do research on a topic, assessing varying scholarly opinions, before coming to his/her own understanding/opinion? I think the crux of Lanier’s argument that the collective anonymous writing of Wiki presents itself as “the authority,” when in reality there is perhaps as much merit, or more, to the outlying ideas. But I may need to read the essay again to get a better grasp on his thesis.
In terms of regurge…I agree with you mostly, though I think 1) students can be lazy, 2) family values can have a big impact, and 3) bad teachers abound (i.e., this isn’t necessarily a systematic problem…though the rewards system (tenure) probably contributes to it). However, to your point I think that within the public system you can go up the ladder to the school board, state education system and federal levels and see the collective/top-down effect. I think that outcome based education is a symptom of this.
Interestingly, my wife wrote her senior thesis on the birth pangs of the public education movement. It apparently had more to do with “socialization” than it did with creating a critical thinking society.