Continuing Digital Nation... Topics/assignment about the "wisdom" of the crowd

start at 52:06 on tues


Today we will start watching Digital Nation

Watching Rushkoff and Dretzin's Digital Nation

life on the virtual frontier

I would like to pose the Following topics taken from online talks from boingboing.net about "the crowd" - particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. 

TOPICS LIST:

Open Source and Crowdsourcing.
What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities on behalf of a corporation or organization? Has the open source movement created new forms, or just copies of old ones? What are the possibilities, here, for new cultural and economic institutions, and how might they be improvements on the status quo? 


The Mob.
What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our connectedness? Does anonymity plus connectivity always equal misbehavior and cruelty? How are we to explain some of the collective anger that seems to be unleashed online - and is it a result of the same anger characterizing much of our society's discourse, or is it the cause?

Whither the Individual?
As we join groups and social networks from affinity sites to Facebook, are we extending and expanding identities, or increasingly conforming to the cookie-cutter profiles demanded of these interfaces? Is the loss of "personal space" and "reflection" so many users complain of merely the necessary surrender of "ego" as we learn to participate as members of a more evolved "collective organism" of "hyper-people?"

Folksonomy and the Folks.
Everybody is, indeed, here now - but should everyone be here? Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? Do collective online activities promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies, or rather to they lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions? Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside?

FOR TUESDAY HAVE 1/2 FINISHED TO START DISCUSSION, FULL POSTING DUE FRI the 1st:

choose one of the above topics for a blog posting on the topic equivalent to at least a 3 page paper ..

You can take a positive or negative stance towards your chosen topic, but you need to back up your opinions with examples from valid sources. This means to include links to your sources.

After that I am going to have you respond to each others blogs in the form of commentaries.

I would advise you to start thinking about and researching your chosen topic as we finish the documentary..