One day I’ll do a lecture on the collective intelligence of a child’s Lego set. I expect a standing ovation on that day.
There is a rather significant difference between “collective intelligence” and information contagion. The secret is the intelligence part. The world we’ve built out of matchsticks and Facebook is very, very good at generating the conditions for contagion but not so good at the sort of filtering and contextualization tasks that lead to intelligence.
Never forget that the fact that we are obscenely well connected to just about every other human being on this planet doesn’t mean that we are using these connections to spread anything useful.
Then again though. It also doesn’t mean that we aren’t.
