Friedrich Nietzsche would have hated Twitter and Wikipedia even more than organized religion. The great champion of the individual will rising above the sheepish masses would have shuddered at what the Internet has given us in the last decade, when the Web became exponentially more social and collaborative. One can only imagine Nietzsche's fury at a method called "crowd-sourcing" and a Web browser called Flock.
I suppose every age has its debate about the individual versus the collective, with associated concerns about the place of genius and expertise, but I suspect we are heading into a decade of especially heightened sensitivity over this tension.
A new romanticism that reveres personal drive and uniqueness is dawning. The spate of books critical of the frenetic social Web, from Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Crown Business) to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf) and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton), are leading indicators. Just as the global expansion of fast food begat the slow-food movement, the next decade will see a "slow information" counterrevolution focused on restoring individual thought and creativity. The neo-Nietzscheans will advocate turning off (your computer) and dropping out (of Facebook).
On the other side will be those who assert, like Aristotle, that human beings are social animals and that the Internet is simply enabling the kind of interaction and collaboration we have desired since the first polis. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was a classics major, after all. This big idea will reach its apex if Facebook, current population 500 million, surpasses China and India sometime in the coming decade to become the largest collective in history.
On a smaller scale, the tension between the individual and the collective will result in hand-wringing about the value of expertise and that elusive element, genius. What good is a professional restaurant reviewer when the crowd can provide wider (if not necessarily deeper) coverage? Will there be any more Newtons and Einsteins now that discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider have hundreds of co-authors? What is the effect on our psyches after we repeatedly find, via Google, that our supposedly original ideas have been previously and precisely explicated by a dozen other people?
And in 2020, will The Chronicle of Higher Education ask a handful of intellectuals to come up with the big idea of the 2020s, or instead aggregate the answers from thousands of readers?
Comments
1. yandoodan - August 30, 2010 at 04:22 pm
This is definitely picking at nits, but ...
... didn't you mean, "The Madding Crowd"? As coined by Thomas Gray in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", and used by Thomas Hardy as a book title?
I note from Wikipedia that a progressive metal band styling itself "Wuthering Heights" quoted it correctly on an album it issued. Perhaps a band member checked it on Wikipedia first.
Here's something else that the Internet has given us: our mistakes are more easily caught, and more easily ridiculed. Nietzsche probably wouldn't have liked that either.
2. harlan2010 - August 30, 2010 at 05:18 pm
David - agree completely with your assessment and would like to add to it
There will be a blacklash to the information as provided via the internet, social media, and standard media. The veracity and objectivity of information will start becoming the issue, quality versus quantity. People are already pushing back and letting the 4th estate know they don;t want opinions, they want facts and data. The adage of changing the channel is already being applied and the internet provides for another recourse - the ability to retaliate. In a very short while people will become more aware of the controls and censorship being applied at forums, blogs, websites, etc. They will realize that opinions are being channeled versus being reported. Already we see every report as to an event, activity, participation, being questioned and refuted. With the ready access and the ease of technology people can readily counter the gross popularization of e-opinion. Gil Scott Heron had it right - the revolution will not be televised, the revolution will be live - in bits and bytes.
3. interested_reader - August 30, 2010 at 09:28 pm
Mr. Cohen,
I for one appreciated your play on words with "The Maddening Crowd". It seemed a most appropriate adaptation given the content of your article.
4. hannaharendt - August 31, 2010 at 02:21 pm
Having recently moved into the Web 2.0 business environment (i.e., I mostly work at home remotely using email, IM, Skype, Twitter etc. for professional "connectivity"), I find this to be an uncanny psyche-changing form of communication with both its charming and vexing moments. On the one hand, serving as a writing coach for a popular how-to wiki site, I have had the great pleasure of working with people from all over the world with whom I have formed some significant bonds during the process of helping members with their writing and English skills. I have witnessed a great sense of accomplishment as they see their writing improve and I have become acquainted with a variety of cultures (I regularly correspond with members from Iran, Pakistan, and Greece, e.g.) through one-on-one relationships. Indeed, I have been extremely impressed by the wiki world, which thinks very intentionally about the meaning and functioning of a community.
On the other hand, as a proprietor of a small admissions consulting start up working the social networking channels, I am going mad. Of couse, one cannot quarrel with the advertising and marketing trends of the day when one is trying to drumb up business. Yet this form of "communication"--little writing bites that are deployed and relayed--has struck me as engendering the normalization of an attention deficit disorder mindset. A sustained attention span, one that moves into something in a comprehensive, deliberate, and critically aware fashion seems to have been supplanted by the compulsion to be present as often as possible, "connected," as they say, and enmeshed in the world of missives dispatched for their use-value. Even talking on the phone these days seems laborious, irrelevant, and antiquated. Why waste characters?
5. harlan2010 - August 31, 2010 at 03:44 pm
let the sheep beware - the following is a timely example of the probable misuses of social media well beyond the entertainment aspects:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100831/sp_yblog_upshot/washington-post-suspends-columnist-for-twitter-hoax
6. drjeff - September 02, 2010 at 11:51 am
@yandoodan-- Go ahead and pick at nits.
I wish there were more of it. I might work in IT and have a degree in a hard science, but it just "bugs the stew out of me" to see the frequent grammar and usage errors in the Chronicle of Higher Education. If there were more picking at nits, maybe the authors (and/or editor, if so) would be more careful.
If people cannot write well here, I fear for our "civilisation."
Note: I didn't mention spelling, for the reason that spelling errors usually don't make the reader stop mid-sentence and say "whoa!" And, at least I can count on articles here normally being thoughtful, which does put it in the top 10%. But isn't it *worse* if a "top 10%" journal can't be counted on for correct writing?
7. drjeff - September 02, 2010 at 11:59 am
Oh, and when I taught high school science, I made it clear to the kids that I considered every class to be a writing class. Although I didn't take off points for grammar, usage or spelling errors, I did correct them and praise the kids for improvement (which most of them showed).
And, relevant to this topic, a person who can write well is exactly the one who will be doing the final edits on those wikis.
When setting up wikis for classes, don't you find that the students with no confidence in their writing ability are also the ones who are reluctant to contribute?
With Web 2.0, even more than before, every class is a writing class.
8. arrive2__net - September 02, 2010 at 06:55 pm
I think among the decade-ideas offered by the Chronicle feature, this is the biggest, because I think crowd-sourcing will become increasingly important. I think the writer has brought to light some of the [perhaps] 'unintended' (or were they intended?) consequences of crowd-sourcing. People will be getting paid for crowd-sourcing, and digesting the provided info, instead of coming up with the idea by themselves. Consider ABC News's oil spill "Mystery Plumber" (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/bp-oil-spill-mystery-plumber-brains-containment-cap/story?id=11182225). Could the "Mystery Plumber" be a crowd-source?
One thing I know about the future is that it is coming, and it is not that easy to predict.
I wonder if crowd-sourcing will be a new college major or grad school degree, like Social Media Marketing? Will crowd-sourcing drive 'content analysis' software to become the wave of the future? Will crowd-sourcing be the fulfillment of Isaac Asimov's fictional science of 'psycho-history' (from the Foundation Trilogy it predicts the future based on crowd behavior). I guess we'll just have to stay tuned ... or connected.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net