Collective Makes the Individual

I appreciate Japanese ingenuity, particularly their digital accessories. However, the strangest inventions I have ever seen stem directly from Japan, and are, quite frankly, hilarious. One involves placing a roll of toilet paper to a helmet, so in case you need to sneeze, a fresh wad of toilet paper hangs conveniently in front of your forehead. Another “innovation” is a gigantic 5-foot long Swiss Army knife, only it contains all the essential farming tools like a rake, hoe, shovel, etc. A personal favorite is a called the “Noodle Eater’s Hair Guard”, a wide-brimmed pink rubber ring that surrounds your face as you eat noodles and prevents your hair from slipping into your food. For obvious reasons, Japanese society routinely turns down these ridiculous ideas- imagine, though, what happens if the Japanese collective begin to give the creative individuals who come up with these wacky ideas some credit and actually begin using the inventions. Would we see people in Tokyo wearing toilet paper rolls over their head, with pink rubber rings circling their faces in noodle shops?

But the reverse question extends well beyond funny Japanese novelties. Where would any of the great individuals of our past have stood without the collective? Edison’s light bulb was an invention indeed, but what if the collective had, for any combination of reasons, simply rejected it and stuck with candlelight? What if Einstein’s physics had been ignored by the scientific collective, like the work of many scientists before him? If the contributions of any given individual had been lost on an apathetic collective? All the individuals that have mattered throughout history have depended upon the collective at the time to accept them and make them matter. Without the acceptance of the collective, all individuals grind down to nothing.

Over the ages, the collective mindset have mattered hugely, much more so than the opinions of individuals. Jaron Lanier’s “Digital Maoism” argues that individuals should be cherished over the collective in a response to the rise of the influence of the collective. However, in a sense, the collective has always mattered more than any individual, before and after the introduction of the Internet. Perhaps we should care more for the individuals of the world, but without the collective, no individual matters at all.

Introducing world connectivity simply makes the collective larger, and individuals still must meet the demands of this collective to become of any importance. Furthermore, in a world where the collective matters so much more than the individual, perhaps trusting in the, at times, obviously untrue collective is better than knowing the opinions of an expert individual. A strange notion, but take a look at a given wiki - its user edited content, if reflective of actual and comprehensive collective opinion, might be seen as fact, in the eyes of the collective. An example- if a Wiki article defines the word “finizzle” as “just short of fuzzy”, and the collective as a whole accepts it and chooses not to edit it, then, in the eyes of the collective that views the wiki, it is in fact true. As Laneir states, the collective is not all-wise and is quite often stupid, but if the entire collective agrees on a topic, in a sense it’s validity no longer matters; the topic becomes defined as the collective defines it and not as an individual expert would attempt to define it, since the collective would simply edit any wiki back to its own preference. In this sense, the advent of the wiki introduced a whole new dimension to the power of the collective- not only does the collective choose the individuals that matter, it now also can define anything it really chooses to, despite the efforts of individuals that may know better. Jaron Lanier’s description in Wikipedia is a perfect example of this- his entry may be incorrect, but to the collective that constantly erases any edits from Lanier, he is a film director, and the actual truth of the matter can be said not to, well, matter.

Lanier may be correct in stating that the individual should be cherished first, but, in a sad sense, the crowd, the hive mind, the collective is all that matters. As the acceptance of innovation and the constant editing of wiki files can demonstrate, individuals may impact the collective, but only if they are allowed to.