I used to fantasize that someday electronic technology would allow the big thinking tasks to be shared by lots of people. Every public official would have an intelligent auxiliary, hundreds of people devoting a few minutes a day to thinking about the big issues coming up, breaking them down into bite sized chunks for processing.
Blogs have apparently made something like this happen. In today's Strib, a piece by Bob Van Sternberg quotes Henry Farrell, co-author of "The Power and Politics of Blogs," on the CBS memo story, "This was a story tailor-made for bloggers. They're not investigative reporters and they don't have the resources of the media. But there are lots of talented people out there who can work for 20 minutes. It was distributed intelligence in which a story can be unpacked into thousands of little bits." Van Sternberg goes on: "What ultimately caused (the memo story) to crumble were the efforts of thousands of bloggers familiar wth typewriter technology, typographical minutae, and military paperwork procedures."
I have hopes, on good days, that the notion of "distributed intelligence" may become as important to political life as "representative government" or "freedom of speech." If we could found democracy widespread involvement of diverse intelligences rather than on an agglomeration of diverse interests, we might have some chance of solving grown-up problems.
Posted by shea0017 at September 22, 2004 12:09 PM