Whether we're for or against.

I suppose that critical mass is a necessary component of the hive mind. The significant connections that might be called thinking, of putting not-necessarily-related elements together to somehow fashion a whole that has a new meaning, surface only when we reach a certain volume of activity. When you're for it, you tend to wax poetic, as with this blogger, from December of 2005:
Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.
Another, in a lengthy (and I should admit, also well written) essay on Flickr (there's also, as frequently seems to be the case, a video) touches on the global brain metaphor:
We now have an analogy for how our brains work on the lowest level. The analogy is simple: A neuron in your brain is a lot like a tag in a tagweb.
This attitude perhaps justifies taggers who gleefully, and seemingly also unreflectively, bookmark every page they visit into their del.icio.us accounts, frequently without any additional explanation that might help those who chance upon their tags understand why visiting the bookmarked page might be worthwhile. It may not look like they're doing much, but hey!, they're actually helping build that pool of grey matter from which, magically, actual thought is going to emerge.

But this is also precisely the reason that those who are much more hesitant to jump onto the hive mind bandwagon also contribute. We may not believe that all this is going to lead to much, but if there's even only a slight chance that it will, it certainly won't happen if we don't make some positive additions. What's more, in the meantime, while we're sitting around waiting for that global brain to materialize, it can't hurt to modestly offer up some good leads to whomever might want them.


Go to: But you can, you can!