Developing a true understanding of the peer to peer relational dynamic requires grappling with the contradictory relationships between the broad participation that it enables, and the issue of hierarchy, leadership, and selection for excellence, which still exist, though in a transformed way. I’m learning a lot from the clear ideas of Marc Fawzi, from whom I reposted his disctintions on crowds and hierarchy (the original is here, the reblogged version is here)
His conclusion is devastating, and I find myself agreeing with it:
- a typical crowd is going to be either a mediocre judge or an unwise one. And nothing else.
This puts into doubth the whole underlying philosophy of many Web 2.0 projects, about which Marc Fawzi concludes:
- I content that it’s a bad thing and that Web 2.0 has got it all wrong by throwing away tens of thousands of years of adaptation and evolution of human society (on the behavioral and structural levels. This regression is being covered up by the false notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds.’
These conclusions are part of a new and expanded version of his article, which I recommend to read in full here.
The articles makes 2 main additional points, next to the new explanation of the hierarchy-crowd dialectic, which we quoted before.
1. Web 2.0 re-enacts the hunter-gatherer mode of production, and: this is not a good thing
2. Therefore, Web 2.0’s hunter-gatherer/unwisdom-of-crowds model needs to be fixed by adding the concept of a non-arbirary hierarchy that is by the crowd (or people) and for the crowd (or people.)Â
Read the original entry here for details on these 2 basic arguments.
