On Collectivism

In the beginning of his article, Digital Maoism, Jaron Lanier comments on his experience with the collective entity that is Wikipedia. Lainer explains that, at one point in his life, he decided to try film. It didn't work out. Yet, anyone interested in his life would learn (incorrectly) from Wikipedia that he is a film director. He could not, despite his efforts, correct this misnomer, the label kept reappearing. Lanier uses this to launch into something of a warning about the dangers of the collective mind. The fact is, the collective has always been there. While it may seem terrifying that the public is doting over Wikipedia, this fad is no different from any other; the collective has always been interesting to people, and people have always made use of it.

In class, we discussed whether the author or the audience ultimately decides the true meaning and value of a piece. What interests me about the question are the people involved. Everyday, people are grouped into units: the masses, the American public, Democrats, teenagers. This happens for a good reason: categories of individuals share similar traits that can be isolated by the label given to the group in question. I make this observation only to shine light on the collectives that already exist; collectives that we give such importance already.

The only difference between the collective of Wikipedia and any other in history is its sheer size. With the Internet, more and more people can choose to be a part of the group. This development is new and probably threatening to the old. For example: speech on the Internet tends to be informal, laced with misspellings and bad grammar, but very few people really care. The Internet connects information with people and people with other people, not properly written documents for academic purposes. The writer of a grammar book I read in high school did not seem to understand this and railed on this for a good 10 pages. Extend this to the collective model that Wikipedia has become, and it is clear: the only reason a thing like Wikipedia exists is because a collective, formed of Internet users, wants it there. The collective existed before the wiki.

While I don't think that humanity's obsession with the collective is anything new or surprising--or perhaps even dangerous, since we've had to deal with it since time immemorial--I do think that Lanier is very right about 'the idea that the collective is all-wise' (Lanier). This is clearly a lie. I have seen and--embarrassingly--have been in groups where everyone thought everyone else knew where the group was going, but in reality no one knew. Proof enough that not everything is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the end, I am convinced that there really isn't anything wrong with with Wikipedia (except perhaps the false information) as what it was meant to be: a user generated, self-correcting, collective document. There are disadvantages to the system, as Lanier points out, but the system is not surprising, and its importance is not unusual or terrifying. Besides, regardless of how often the world is warned about the dangers of the collective, humanity is a collective, and we wouldn't want to erase ourselves, now would we?

Works Cited: Lanier, Jaron. “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of Online Collectivism” Edge. 30 May 2006. Accessed: 17 September 2006.