Communities of Ones

So the crux – or at the very least a major discussion area in our offline discussions – has been the idea of the tension between the individual and the community. Specifically two major questions we’ve asked: whether the individualistic-communitarion dichotomy is in fact a false dichotomy and whether one can have a community of individuals or if that is simply a society as per Tonnies’ definition. Kathy Sierra, one of the authors in the O’Reilly series of books talks about the idea that “One of Us is Smarter than All of Us” in the Passionate Users blogs.

Her argument is a summary of James Suroweicki’s book the Wisdom of Crowds . Her two main points about his book from her blog of March 21, 2005 include:

“The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group.”
and
“”Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Apparently you need individuals to come up with ideas on their own, then share them with the group, and use a mechanism such as voting or discourse to come to what amounts to a reasonable assimilation or average of all the ideas (although not all parts were equal). While Suroweicki is for all intents and purposes a populist writer, and is not arguing for an individualistic community – it did spark the idea in my head that it might be possible to create a community of individuals if the goal of that community was to find answers to particular things or to be particularly creative.

Makes we want to explore Rheingold’s description of the “group mind” (1993) from the Well a little more…even though it seems somewhat ominous to me.