Clay Shirky responds to Nick Carr

Nick, I'm with you on collaborative novels et al being pretty
uniformly terrible (and said so in _Here Comes Everybody_). It's not
just art, either. As Richard Hackman (social psychologist at Harvard
who studies teams) noted in _Leading Teams_, there are almost no forms
of writing that benefit from collaboration (reference works, of
course, being the notable exception.)

That having been said, though, I do want to take issue with this:

A crowd cannot have an idea; only an individual can have an idea.

I don't think the question is binary between individuals and crowds; I think it's a sliding scale, relating to the degree of synchronization.

As a counter-observation, groups can have ideas that individuals
can't. The history of popular music in the 20th century is a history
of surprisingly collaborative groups in jazz and rock creating music
that simply can't be analyzed as the contribution of an individual
mind. Mick Jagger plus a set of session men, no matter how technically
skilled, would not have been the Rolling Stones.

Even for kinds of creation we think of as solitary pursuits, such as
painting, there are scenes and schools where ideas echo and return
through the membership in ways that defy accounting as a set of
individual breakthroughs. I just walked through MoMA the other day,
and was struck again at how little time elapsed between Manet saying
"Hey you guys, lets paint outdoors!" and Cezanne deciding that
individual brush strokes didn't need to be hidden from the viewer. All
of that explosion of new thinking in painting happened in and around
one Parisian painting studio and one cafe. (_Collaborative Circles_,
btw, is a great book on the importance of artistic scenes in fomenting
and spreading aesthetic revolt.)

Part of the issue with very large scale examples is that they are,
almost by definition, so large as to defy the kind of synchronization
that we know at "band" and "scene" scales -- asking "What are the
largest collaborative projects?" is no more a guide to the behavior of
the median collaborative group than asking "What are the best selling
novels" is a guide to the contents of most literary fiction.