This Post is a Klein Bottle
Posted by Kimberly Stedman on December 2, 2006
<Monty_Python_Voice>
[1] “IT’S…”
Collective intelligence is about processing ideas through multiple individuals. For example, you might have an idea (start with: “Maybe I should go to med school”), and pass it through five people you trust to help the idea mature (end with: “I should wait to go to med school for at least a year, but then I should definitely go, and I should go to John Hopkins University which has a program I would really like, and I should specialize in pediatrics”). Each participant in the chain adds to the idea and becomes an essential part of the thinking process.
Collective intelligence is one of several linked fields that address how human beings move, and think, in groups: social dilemmas, social networks, smartmobs, computer-mediated communication, metacognition… It’s a long list, filled with evocative phrases. The academics and companies that study these topics produce incredible, science-fiction worthy technologies which are already changing the face of how the swarm of modern humanity conducts itself.
[2] “I’M…”
I stumbled blindly onto these topics about five years ago, just by virtue of reading the right chain of books, and became hungry and passionate about the discipline. By hook, crook, and a special deal with my university’s Academic Dean, I managed to carve out an independent track within my graduate program which allowed me to get a master’s covering some of these topics. Unfortunately, though, I was never able to connect myself into the network of other people who were also working on these subjects. I studied and experimented with the ideas, but I didn’t talk about them much, and I didn’t collaborate.
After I graduated, I spent a year on contract at Microsoft. Now that that year is over, and I’m moving back into the field. This time I want to collaborate with other interested folks, disseminate the information I’m finding, and get my ideas out in public where they can be shot at and mutated.
So: a social systems blog. To (as in the first paragraph defining the concept of collective intelligence itself) pass ideas about collective intelligence and its sister disciplines through any smart, perceptive people who I can lure to the table. Here is my forum to watch you, whoever you are (friends/strangers, experts/newbies), dismantle the ideas I present here, kibosh half of them, and glue the other half together into some new conceptual Frankenstein monster that I couldn’t have come up with on my own.
[3] “YOU’RE…”
If the social technology ideas that you read about here agitate your brain, then respond to the posts. Brain agitations are the only valid credentials (although decent grammar, like personal hygiene, never hurts).
Social technology is already shaping my life, your life, and the lives of everyone we deal with. We’re already using it every day, and it’s the foundation of an upcoming flood of innocuous little modern tools and devices which, in no time at all, will totally revolutionize the topography of daily social existence. Really. It’s already happening now, and it will happen a lot more very soon. These technologies will wield the folks who use them (read: everybody), or we, the users, will wield them.
If that makes your head spin, then here’s a good newbie-friendly forum to put that spin to use. …Thus wielding this very social technology, the blog, to figure out how to wield social technologies to optimal effect. (see, now you get the header about the Klein bottle : ) ).
And speaking of which: This is one of those deadly My First Blog blogs, so I imagine my first dozen entries will be blind swings which fully miss 12 Best Blogging Practices at a go. You want to shore me up, herd me away from any blogging pratfalls, suggest topics, etc., feel free to email me.
