[MD] Memes and themes of community dances

[John Carl]

TED curator, Chris Anderson makes some damn interesting points in this
month's Wired, about "Crowd Accelerated Innovation".
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_tedvideos/

The following excerpts are those I find the most pertinent to issues
discussed around here for some time.  Well, by me and Ian, anyway.

"When we decided to post TED talks free on the web four years ago, something
unexpected happened: Speaker behavior changed. Specifically, they started
spending more time preparing for the talks. The slots are 18 minutes long,
but in many cases the speakers had crammed weeks or even months of
preparation into those 18 minutes.

For example, Jill Bolte Taylor, whose memorable talk describing her own
stroke has attracted more than 7 million views, told me that she wrote the
talk over several months and then spent an entire month rehearsing it. It
showed. Other speakers saw what was out there and gave themselves the task
of doing something different and better. We started to see wonderful
creative touches in how talks were put together… ranging from J.J. Abrams’
mystery box to Hans Rosling’s solidified laser pointer (a long pole).

Indeed, the quality of talks across the board (as measured by audience
rankings) was rising. It seemed that posting the talks online had done two
things: It gave speakers a library of examples of what constituted a great
talk. And it gave them more reason to shine."

-------

"The absurd camp calls YouTube a festering swamp of adolescent distraction:
narcissism, kitten videos, and fart jokes. The obvious camp thinks it’s old
news that the Internet fosters communities and promotes innovation (and this
camp may view online video as a relatively insignificant new contributor to
a familiar theme).

Both camps have a point. But they’re missing the big picture. The true
significance of online video has been mischaracterized and underreported."
*"Innovation* has always been a group activity. The myth of the lone genius
having a eureka moment that changes the world is indeed a myth. Most
innovation is the result of long hours, building on the input of others.
Ideas spawn from earlier ideas, bouncing from person to person and being
reshaped as they go. If you’re comfortable with the language of memes, you
could say a healthy meme needs an ecosystem not of a single brain but of a
network of brains. That’s how ideas bump into other ideas, replicate,
mutate, and evolve.

So Crowd Accelerated
Innovation<http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html>isn’t
new. In one sense, it’s the only kind of innovation there’s ever been.
What is new is that the Internet—and specifically online video—has cranked
it up to a spectacular degree.

The way I see it, Crowd Accelerated Innovation requires three ingredients: a
crowd, light, and desire. Let’s take each in turn.

*A crowd.* A crowd is simply a community, any group of people with a shared
interest. It can be narrow (unicycling, Greek archaeology) or broad
(science, world peace), small (my village) or large (humanity). The
community needs to contain at least a few people capable of innovation. But
not everyone in the community need be. There are plenty of other necessary
roles:

   - The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early.
   - The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y.
   - The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group.
   - The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest.
   - General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.

Different people may occupy these various roles at different times,
including that of innovator. Innovation is a response to a particular set of
challenges or inspirations. Every mind is unique. Presented with the right
fine-tuned pattern of incoming stimulation, I suspect, most people have a
shot at coming up with something wonderfully new and fresh. But even if not,
they can still play any of the other key roles."
**----------

He also makes some interesting analysis of what happens when a crowd falls
below a certain population - using the example of Madagascar.  Regression
occurs when population is too small.   I'm sure Horse would disagree,  but I
postulate that the Moq's de-emphasis of the community in favor of the lone
genius model of DQ, is bound to lead to MD's imminent demise.  imho.

John