Douglas Rushkoff

I may fall into an existential quandary pretty soon, but at least it's for a good cause.

Accepting that we may never - or at least not in our lifetimes - get to the core of the questions of exactly where ideas emerge from, might we compare the quality of ideas and creations that emerge from individuals (or appear to) and those that emerge one level up, from the group? Or, particularly the networked "mass" group?

Are the early creations attributed to these groups promising? And do such activities, occurring on such tremendous scale, as Sherry suggests, diminish one's sense of place, purpose, or importance?

And I don't mean to leave the Danah/RU thread dangling, either. It seems that the early returns on networked group activity are entirely clouded by the way the forces of the market have found new paths of exploitation and overload through the digital.

(I never know whether to blame the technology or the hyper-capitalism over-working me through it.)