COINs 2009: Reflections on the first-ever conference on Colaborative Innovation Networks
Posted by Dustin Larimer | 1 Nov 2009
We are a collaborative species. No single perspective could possibly cover every aspect of an issue, but together through the collage of our collective experience we wage war on the challenges of our reality. This is collective intelligence, an emergent characteristic of life that we see in many other social species like honeybees, ants, and migratory birds. At every level of complexity an individual’s best efforts could never compare to the magnitude of the seemingly intelligent behavior of the swarm.
I’ve been listening to Taleb’s
The Black Swan. It presents counterfactuals to counter any blunt elevation of the mob, smart or otherwise.
The financial implosion of the last year was the most dramatic storm to emerge out of a bad weather pattern that only a few lonely experts predicted, and did so going back
ten years. It’s worth noting: financial product development is very collaborative, very tied into computer processing power, and very much given to forming its own epistemologies.
This recap (of COINs) is, nevertheless, very interesting. My own contact with social network analysts sometime ago was amusing. I asked the dude about how a social network map might develop to capture the various psychological dimensions.
Without more dimensionality, such a map at least serves several secondary purposes. One is that people project upon them.
I’m observing a development project here in Cleveland. It has a considerable virtual social infrastructure.
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’
From:
The Center For Collective Intelligence @MIT ) / added to the link roll.
“Our basic research question is” huh? Don’t you mean: Our basic area of developmental interest is…?
One of the most fascinating features of the social environs of the internet, and of our times, is how two features come together: (what I call,) “social instruments,” with “progressivism.”
I hold the idea: post-modern progressivism. But, my intuition and to some extent my experience, and to large extent my tentative interpretation, is that what jumps out is the revival of instrumentalism. So, there is evocation of the non-linear in the talk, but the walk is about how to do together this task of “saving,” salvation, and,
waging war on the challenges of reality.
I would endorse jumbling together techno nerds with anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, literary critics, and others.
Hopefully the mob’s echo chamber can come under the kinds of pressure which implements and concentrates a more robust critical culture.
