TIME.com: Time's Person of the Year: You -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Digg: On the Outside Looking In. « East Coast Blogging However, I fear that Digg itself has become irrelevant to most of us. Not that the site won’t continue to grow and prosper, nor will many of us stop using it. But we will only be using it as a member of the audience, not really good enough to participate, just good enough to watch the action unfold before us.

MercuryNews.com | 12/27/2006 | Technologist focuses on media and democracy Florin said he is concerned by both the cutbacks in traditional media, as well as the enormous increase in unconventional sources on the Web. ``There's a problem: It's hard to know if you can trust the information that you can get. But there's also an opportunity,'' he said.

Just as time magazine was gushing over the social revolution on the web, others have been putting a more realistic perspective on things. In particular, on how real groups work. It seems to be clear that there is no such thing as unlimited freedom in collective decision making or wisdom of the crowds. Any collective needs to have structure and that will always emerge no matter how flat the org-chart seems to be. Also, any collective can only exist if there are people on its margins and outside of it. And if the collective controls most resources...again...no freedom. And finally, crowds can be only wise about themselves. So if we want to know how the crowds will behave in the marketplace - we should ask them. But if we want to know things that are outside the interest of the crowd, the majority, the collective, then they are the wrong person to ask. However, these things are also only in the interest of some other crowd or collective so we need to join them. This, again, is nothing surprising or unusual - multiple identities have been with us for millennia.

So the conclusion is, the internet can bring nothing new to the table of human social behavior. However, it can bring a new demarcation of groupings and a reorganization of topological connections. But the ultimate complexity of the system can only increase in as much as its weakest link will allow. And that is the human brain’s capacity for social knowledge and the concomitant limits of time and space on maintaining social interactions. E.g. having 100 ‘friends’ on MySpace doesn’t mean that a larger group is being maintained. It just means that the maintaining of personal identity and certain groups includes short messages on the boards. Any close sociological interaction analysis will show the limits of these links (I’m pretty sure) to be similar to those of links maintained in more traditional ways.