The Great Whole

These last several weeks of the semester have gone by extremely quickly. This week I’m thinking about Newton’s 2nd law – you know the one about acceleration. It states that the acceleration of an object is dependant on two factors: the force being applied to it and its mass. Objects pick up speed as they travel towards the goal they have been aiming for. We are closer to graduation than the beginning and we certainly have picked up a lot of momentum on the way! Unfortunately lately I have been totally immersed in technology, and my projects, and I’m not feeling too centered as a physical being. When I was coding my slideshow the other day to put in this blog it wasn’t centering either. I had a heck of a time with it, soon realizing that the player wanted to be embedded in a [div] tag in order for the formatting to work in the blog post. Okay I’ll try that for myself and see if that helps [div] karen [/div].

In Web Design II this week one of the students posted an AP news story written by Brian Bergstein about a new kind of online encyclopedia called Citizendium. Seems the founder of this new resource, Larry Sanger, is widely known as an early co-founder of Wikipedia.org. Sanger wants a new more accountable version that is written by experts in the field, experts who wouldn’t have to have the articles that they spent time and energy on able to be edited anonymously with a few keystrokes. “Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility – and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.”



Thanks to Randall Munroe (xkcd.com) for the cartoon. I like Wikipedia. I like the concept. I like the chaos. There are 1.1 billion internet users out there all over the globe. That number is staggering - 17% of the population worldwide! How fun is that?! As a teacher I have always told my students that any encyclopedia is a good place to start your search for information on a topic, but they better not list it in their bibliography as a source. So the criticism heaped on Wikipedia doesn’t make it any less valuable to me. I don’t think the criticism matters too much to Wikipedia either – it has a rather exhaustive page all about it. And quite frankly who are these experts that want control over all this information anyway? It is the same “they” that controls the hidden web? I am able to see only a skimming-the-surface fraction of what is out there. There is general agreement that the web that is hidden from me is 500 times larger than what I have access to. For every one I see there are 500 hidden! The hidden web is information that is kept locked behind passwords and sometimes available only if I can afford to pay for it. Knowledge as a commodity is a lousy model for a true democracy.

How can we expect to creative true collective intelligence if the information isn’t free and available to everyone to build upon? We have an amazing opportunity in cyberspace. In Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Pierre Levy reminds us that the system for the production and distribution of knowledge doesn’t depend on the individual features of the human cognitive system alone, but also on collective methods of organization and the instruments with which information is communicated and processed (200). So here we are at another cultural revolution, the digital one. And we can do the whole chicken and the egg dance. Is technology creating us? Or did we create the technology? Although it may have seemed that little personal computer spores blew their way on the wind into everyone’s homes that is so not the case. Cyberspace is a reflection of us. And right now it’s showing itself to be a self-organizing system which scares those that want to have control. Think about this definition from Dr Nancy Andreasen in The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius...

A self-organizing system is one that is literally a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is defined as a system that is created from components that are in existence and that spontaneously reorganize themselves to create something new, without the influence of any external force or executive plan. Control over self-organizing system is not centralized. It is distributed over the entire system (62).