Lots of conversations now. They are heated, contentious, threatening to many of us, and they are all good. It’s where we learn today, in these conversations.
Right now, a lot of us are struggling with what authority and source means within the context of contemporary literacy. I was reading The Long Tail last night, while I was waiting for me fried New England Clam Chowder, and ran across this paragraph, concerning Google. It could, as easily be about Wikipedia or Del.icio.us.
It makes connections that you or I might not. Because they emerge naturally from math or a scale we can’t comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web’s “massive-scale” statistics hardwired into its DNA. That’s why it’s so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.
Certainly it frightens us. This new web of organically assembled, self-healing information comes out of an alien intelligence, where we are neurons participating and a community encyclopedia of knowledge. It’s weird. Is it working?
Dave,
The first thing that came to mind was EPIC 2015
I imagine it was none to easy for the Ancient world to watch the shift of power to the New world ( and they had 500 or so years to get used to it )
Once Columbus annoucned that world is not flat. and started spreading small pox, nothing was ever the same.
Now that google and others are indeed making a liar of Columbus (liar I think is one of the nicer tags Columbus was accustomed to) because it turns out the world is flatter than anyone can imagine,we who now are part of the new ” ancient world” are not comfortable. Because nothing will ever be the same. Unstoppable, exciting, but terrifying to say the least.
hmmm well Dave once again you have got me thinking…. This time to the point where I think I may offend some folk…. but I have written a lengthy post that was a comment but became a post…. http://blog.brettmoller.com/?p=171
Scary alien intelligence? – ha! How about the natural order of things? It existed long before the invention of computers.
Besides, it has been described by many geniuses such as:
1) Karl Jung’s – collective unconscious” (quote from Wikipedia -” The collective unconscious is also known as “a reservoir of the experiences of our species.”)
2) Peter Mark Roget – Thesaurus (quote from Wikipedia – “Roget’s Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual “meaning clusters” or semantically linked words. These words are not exactly synonyms, but can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.”