Dreaming 5GW

I posted earlier on the idea of Twitter as a form of distributed cognition. But that might be too simplistic—and mechanistic—a look at the evolving medium. The idea of Twitter as a “mass mind” does not really make sense outside of the context of poetic metaphor. Rather, it makes more sense to think of Twitter as a social ecoystem.

Noam Cohen makes this point explicit in his review of a book on Wikipedia. He analogizes Wikipedia to a kind of rambling global city:

“Wikipedia can no more be completed than can New York City, which O. Henry predicted would be ‘a great place if they ever finish it.’ In fact, with its millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, its ever-expanding total of articles and languages spoken, Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online. Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.”

Twitter, unlike Wikipedia, is a lower-density medium intended for facilitating conversation. A global coffee shop, not a global city. But as anyone who has been to a bar can recall, even the smallest of establishments take on the quality of a miniature universe. I belong to a small Twitter circle (and blog circle) that focuses on the intersection of world politics, military affairs, and social media. Each person within that circle is a node that expands outwards in concentric circles.

There is a temptation to visualize social media as mass mind. But is each individual blogger or Twitterer merely a small part of a gigantic hive mind? Jaron Lanier attacks this kind of digital collectivism as “Digital Maoism,” but it seems that the problem is empirical, not ideological, in nature. There’s certainly a mass-mind aspect to viral campaigns and aggregator sites, but is something like Twitter really best described as a hive mind?

As Twitter grows it will become more important as a tool of strategic influence. If we view Twitter as a mass mind or a thought-system we may fall prey to the temptation to think that it, like a human mind, can be harnessed as a means of “reflexive control.” In other words, a piano we can play to our tune. Twitter is better used as a mobilization tool for viral campaigns or a public relations rapid-response platform. 

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