Hitchhiking the Blogosphere: Collective Intelligence and Service

One reason I migrated back into the blogosphere after a self-imposed hiatus is my emerging understanding of these spaces as tools of knowledge.  Blogs first gained power and notoriety as websites providing alternate slants on the news.  Smart (most of the time) writers filter through multiple newsstories, aggregating data, and synthesizing the information into a metacritique of both world events and the mainstream media that reports those events.  The movement forced some newscasts to become more and more self-reflexive as CNN and others added “web” or “Internet” reporters whose specific jobs are to cull the net for alternate media and blog based editorial writing.  I have Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish linked on the blogroll at the bottom.  I don’t always agree with the guy, but I often take an interest in his perspective on current events.

I also write on Harry Potter and related subjects at Sword of Gryffindor.  My favorite aspect of working with Travis Prinzi’s website is the collaborative/discursive model that he fosters, allowing readers to participate in any post or essay by offering response.  At least some dialogic thread runs through every post because it often seems as though each post and its attending comments build upon previous interactivity in earlier discussions.  I’ve looked for a manner of understanding this, and Henry Jenkins provides a term I had not heard before recently:  collective intelligence, or “a model of deliberation in which diverse groups of people consciously compare notes and work through problems together” (para 13).  Jenkins further writes of this model :

• As I noted in my keynote remarks, the push towards collective intelligence requires us to rethink the nature of expertise and the historic monopoly that schools and institutions of higher learning have claimed over the production and circulation of knowledge. Collective Intelligence recognizes that there are diverse forms of expertise and that we learn more if we draw on as many different minds as possible rather than placing our trust in singular minds. At the same time, this push towards collective intelligence should force academics to engage more actively in public dialog with other kinds of “experts” who operate outside of the so-called “Ivory Tower.” We have much to contribute, and much to learn, through participation within these larger conversations, which are being enabled through networked computing.
• Most of our current educational practices are based on the assumption that schools produce autonomous thinkers. We need to rethink our pedagogical practices to reflect the way knowledge is being produced and distributed within a networked culture. This means that we need to help young people identify and foster their own expertise while giving them skills at weighing evidence and arguments presented by others who also participate within their knowledge community. It means that we need to help them develop a set of ethical practices which holds them responsibile for the value of the information and insights they contribute to the group.
• Collective intelligence is going to work best on a scale larger than the individual college or university. As such, the push towards collective intelligence is closely linked towards moves for distance learning and for open courseware. Yet, it may force us to rethink some of the models shaping our first steps in that direction. Most of these efforts start from the assumption that information travels from an elite centralized institution to a range of peripheral locations. Collective Intelligence, however, starts from the premise that information must circulate freely and equally among all of the participating institutions.
• Collective intelligence places a new value on diversity — this is true in both the explicit (deliberative) model and the implicit (aggregative) model. The greater diversity of inputs into the process, the richer the output. Higher education still often thinks about diversity through a lens of affirmative action and remediation. Instead, incorporating greater diversity into a collective intelligence process benefits all of the participants.  (para. 15-18)

As an academic afflicted with a slightly punk attitude (chalk it up to my Southeastern Kentucky upbringing), I like the notion of pulling the academy back into engagement with communities beyond the “Ivory Tower”.  Connected to the collective intelligence movement is a strident desire to move toward more open access for scholarship.  A recent New York Times article detailed a proposed vote to allow for open web access to the scholarly work of their faculty — Harvard’s Arts and Sciences faculty voted to approve the measure.  The distancing of universities from their communities has been addressed, to a degree.  A couple of the schools I teach at have placed increased emphasis on service projects by faculty linking scholarship to the surrounding community. 

 However, I also note the potential for another tendancy adhering to such a movement.  An emphasis on pragmatic specialties would seem to be the temptation here.  And as someone teaching in the humanities, I welcome one boon, yet grow cautious.  The great connection between English Studies and the general community is in literacy.  We can contribute so much to increasing literacy and literacy awareness, which are two markers for which American students have suffered declining abilities and test scores for many years, now.  And improvement in literacy would lead to perhaps a better understanding of the scholarly side of English Studies.  Right now, English Departments are generally directed to two basic purposes, especially at regional public institutions:  1)training English teachers; 2)providing rhetoric and writing instruction as a service course for the university as a whole. 

One possible side effect that I would welcome is  the potential ripping away of the pretentious facade of English Studies scholarship.  The greatest criticism of my profession is that which rightly assesses our tendancy to privilege certain types of writing over others, that genre fiction is aesthetically or formally inferior to “literary” fiction, that great examples of graphic storytelling like Watchmen should not be considered alongside acknowledged postmodernist masters like DeLillo or Pynchon.  We might be forced to consider primary sources more relevant to modern culture rather than complaining that average readers don’t care about what we teach in academia.  We often do not understand that we could have discursive relationship with the community-at-large many other fields of study cannot.  The humanities is a disciplined unconstrained by a rigid scientific method.  We are dialectical by nature, and must resist the temptation to retreat to the confines of lecture hall even if the public does not always agree with us.  They’re not supposed to.  Especially if we believe our job is to challenge the dominant narratives of our time and focus some attention on marginalized others, we should engage as much as possible. 

Academia has at least implicitly told the community that “we’re smarter than you”, that the common perspective is not an intellectually rigorous or valid one.  I tend to wonder if this is at least one reason why public discourse has taken the direction it has .  Ironically, as we have worked to offer education to as many people as possible, public discussion has become much more jingoistic, laboring under one pathetic fallacy after another.  Editorials pass as argumentation and presidential debates pass as true political discussion.  We can solve this dilemma by taking advantage of the dialectical, rhetorical, and interactive models offered in modern technology.