Who are my editors?
June 28th, 2006 by marc
Jarod Lanier, in his article in Edge, DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [5.30.06] points out the shortcomings of using the hive-mind or digital comunalism as a guide to knowledge in the world. Traditionally, this has been done by individuals deciding who their editors are to be in life, whether it is to be a Steward Alsop, or an Esther Dyson, the New York Times, or Rush Limbaugh. Our choice of guides in our intellectual journey defines who we are.
The greatest successes to date in organizing and then finding information on the web has resulted from the harnessing of all information and blending it using a single point of view assigning its own weights to information sources. Google’s PageRank is a notable example.
The promise of what’s been called Web 2.0 is that individuals will be able to define what they care about and how much for themselves, and use this to traverse the knowledge space. They will do this by creating ad-hoc social networks of “likeness” seeded by a few well-know root trusted sources and then grown our of there by adding into the mix others which are encountered and resonate.
This process is precisely what we at Activeweave are engaged in facilitating. Define your editors, contextualize your web experience through their eyes, encounter more, roll them together, and bring them along with you as you browse the web.