This week's reading response except ...

... there is NO assignment this week. Fool!

At least the universe can have it. Not that anyone but me inhabits this backwater of Cyberspace. (That's not a complaint by the way.)

The longer the course goes the more I wonder if I’m deluding myself about my ability to read this modern, online world of ours. Is it, I wonder, that I’m on the wrong side of the cusp of change to see properly what’s happening? At (almost) 59, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male and comfortably-enough off in my middle-class bubble I’m not quite too old to be entirely cut off from the Internet era (unlike, let’s say, my 85-year old mother who – despite 10 years of family effort – simply doesn’t get it. Won’t even switch on the laptop we bought her to Skype her son in Australia unless her youngest son, my brother is in the room).  But those personal characteristics of mine also, perhaps, exclude me from having any (let me call it) organic sense of the ‘new normal’; the profoundly altered online sphere of social relations that’s arisen as a result of information technology changes in the last two decades or so. 

"What's wrong with this Internet connection?"
Photo: AP

In short, reading Jaron Lanier’s article (from You Are Not A Gadget) I find myself wondering, am I more like my mother than I think? I may correspond by e.mail, have Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, blog and live quite a bit online but is it within an already obsolete paradigm – one of the last generation of Neanderthals, co-existing with the Homo Sapiens but doomed to extinction?

That’s a long way of saying I’m moderately sceptical about Mr. Lanier’s pessimistic fears. So my response concentrates on a key aspect of his article; the need to build protection against crowd-thinking and the hive mind. 

For most (but I concede not all) of Mr. Lanier’s article he expresses concerns about crowd-thinking / hive minds as if it’s a new phenomenon, an unforeseen and harmful result of the lowest common denominator pattern of social relations engendered by online environments. Clearly, though, the absurd / foolish / dangerous / incomprehensible behaviour of crowd thinking / hive minds can be seen throughout Modernity’s history, for example:

• The tulip bulb ‘mania’ of 1637 (the crowd-thinking / hive mind character of which was discussed as early as 1841 in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) 
• The rise and catastrophic consequences of Nazi Germany.
• The mass-hysterical response of vast swathes of the British population in 1997 to the untimely death of HRH Diana Princes of Wales.

The phenomenon is not new. Whether or not the Internet has accelerated, deepened or materially altered (Lanier suggests for the worse) our crowd-thinking / hive mind tendencies is debatable. In his article, searching for what he might see as an adequate response to or defence against the hive, Mr. Lanier (commenting on works by Suroweicki and Taleb) suggests, it seems to me, an old-world, elitist framework of rule-setting as safeguarding:

"Maybe if you combined all our approaches you’d get a practical set of rules for avoiding crowd failures. Then again, maybe we are all on the wrong track. The problem is that there’s been inadequate focus on the testing of such ideas." 

I disagree with his conclusion there. History frequently tests human potential to err through crowd-thinking and we fail time after time after time. 

It seems to me – as has probably always been true – the defences against the worst excesses of crowd-thinking and the hive mind remain greater transparency, informed choice and active engagement within a democratic, pluralist framework. The creation (and power) of the Internet may not alter those fundamental requirements which, to date, we have never fully realised in any human society. And the Web may also introduce new, more powerful barriers that protect the interests of the already powerful. But the search for safeguards that Mr. Lanier proposes must not be outsourced to or remain with the architects and designers of the machine. They must be involved, of course. But just like the rest of us, as active citizens.