The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.
Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of ?emergent democracy? that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual?making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions.
Moore's essay seems to be heading toward a collectivist vision until he makes this point:
The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds?your mind and my mind?together we create the movement. . . . [A]ny one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list. Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpower?but the one that eventually catches fire is started by an individual.
Would a movement born in individual liberty preserve that liberty for the future, or would the collective mind bury the individual beneath its mass? My vote is for the former. (via MetaFilter)
No comments:
Post a Comment