Digital Maoism

As I was reading "Digital Maoism," I wanted to disagree with Lanier. I know that Wikipedia is a great resource for me and has amazing potential. I was also put off by his writing style. It seemed as if he was writing a blog post and not a well-researched article. Lanier often gave me the feeling that he did not have a true understanding of many of the sites he criticized. An example of this is in his discussion of "popurls." He uses a very specific example taken out of context as an argument against the value of the site: "In the last few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on popurls. Popurls does clue us in to this news: 'Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating record, worst ever ice cream headache.'" Popurls displays hundreds of links on the front page and Lanier decided to discuss one news story that wasn't on the site and one pointless story that was. Today, September 20th, 2006, I see stories such as "Hilarious IRC Quotes,"(and they are hilarious) and "15 Ugliest Hockey Logos Ever." However, fluff stories are the minority. There are also very important and interesting stories such as "Chavez calls Bush 'the devil' At U.N.," "Inflation Fears Ease," "Chat Bot: Computer Program Smart Enough to Carry on Conversation," "Atomic Arabs: A Nuclear Dawn in the Gulf?" and "Tanks appear in Bangkok. Thailand calls state of emergency." The range of stories on this page is very similar to that of a television news program. There are often many more fluff stories on television news programs, but at least you don't have to watch the news anchors pretend to be interested.
Even though I don't agree with the way Lanier supported his point, he is ultimately correct. Wikipedia is not the ultimate source for facts; Popurls is not the best place to find daily news; John Lennon would have never made it to the finals of American Idol. The collective approach is not always the best approach. It works extremely well in certain situations and horribly in other situations. We have to find the problems that the collective mind does well and open source those, but also find the problems that the collective mind cannot solve and find another way to solve them. This is my interpretation of Lanier's essay, and even though I don't agree with many of the individual points he makes, I find his overall ideas to be very accurate and important.
However, Lanier misjudges the severity of the situation. When I look at a wikipedia entry, I'm aware that the information on that page has the potential of being biased or simply false. I don't use Wikipedia for in depth research or as a base of all of my information. I use Wikipedia as a way to get some simple information very quickly and as I'm reading the entry, I decide whether or not I trust it. In this way, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I don't know if other people are unable to evaluate entries well, but I don't see the collective mind leading to the downfall of intelligence as Lanier seems to.