This year, Edge’s World Question is “How has the internet changed the way you think?” which, at first glance, just re-emphasizes my perma-”so what” state. I started reading through the 16 pages of essays on the flight this morning, however, and even though the question may be mediocre some of the responses are world class. Stewart Brand has an especially astute observation on how the Internet better enables distributed collaboration:
One’s Guild
I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.
Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it’s not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I’ll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing.
Absolutely the most perfect word.
There are a couple of concepts bouncing around in my mind, rough draft, that need definition.
One: when everyone you follow on Twitter shares the same link over and over again. There should be a version of the word for when it’s a dumb post I’d rather never had read, and another version for when it’s a smart post I’d like to share too but don’t want to join the crowd of oversharers.
Two: the act of subconciously comparing your writing with that of the best authors on the web. The difference between paper and pixels is that your production, your mind babies, are public by default. Knowledge of this, from my perspective, drives a much stronger awareness of how other people interpret your communication skills. Offered just in paper form, pieces of Andrew Spittle’s senior thesis would gather a readership of his professors, close friends and family. On the web, his potential readership grows exponentially and is far more likely to gather critique and feedback. I believe it’s this underlying awareness that drives more people to write more things that are worthwhile.
This is a new frontier. We need to actively create the words that best articulate the web’s nuances.
