Online shared intelligence

Here come the totally inane

Social networks can (and will) be leveraged to enable powerful transformations… but first they will be used for the most inane, mindless, junk.

As Clay Shirky tells us in “Here comes everybody“, the ridiculously low transaction costs imposed by social networking makes it trivial for people with the same interests to find each other and ACT. That can be a powerful tool for change in the hands of an infinite number of groups of people who (a) have common interests, (b) were too handicapped by geography, cost of discovery and interaction and (c) were somehow abused or exploited by other parties who benefitted from some asymmetry in transaction costs. Mr. Shirky writes beautifully in his book about victims of priest abuse, people whose phones were stolen, and many other beautifully exemplified cases.

Unfortunately, he also tells us that that ridiculously low transaction costs and enablement for action comes to the hands of terrorists and “amateurs”, people who can now trivially publish all sorts of junk. Point in case, check out David Hasselhoff social. The charter of the site (presumably the actor’s own voice?) is worth thinking about:

I realized that while two people from two entirely different countries and backgrounds may seem to have nothing in common, the only thing they might have in common is me… So I decided to start a network where people from across the world might come together and get a conversation started over me. Where it will lead, I don’t know but the world would be a better place

Well, you may wonder, if you are going to a party where all you know about the participants is that they all personally admire and identify with a fictitious, mostly cartoonish TV character, impersonated by a walking plastic surgeon’s droid, what are your chances of finding somebody you can talk meaningfully with about things you care about… Well, imagine a large space (15,000 people and growing as of this post), where everyone is exchanging snippets of a couple of meaningless personal comments, things like “how sexy is DH”, “I pleasure myself to DH”, “i want to bury myself on his furry manchest” and an infinite variety of equally inane, mindless chatter, and getting together in hugely transformational self-help associations such as DH’s Hair Appreciation Society: “For we all love his hair, be it body or head….. or other unknown lost places, appreciate it right here. Whether it’s your cat, nana, girlfriend, whoever, that has THE HOFF’S hair, lets chat about it”.

No question about it: The total aggregate intelligence of the planet is a constant (and the population is growing)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.