Nicholas Carr responds to Rushkoff

People have always worked together in groups to produce stuff that they couldn't produce on their own, as a visit to, say, a symphony orchestra will nicely illustrate. What the Net does is enlarge the scale of such efforts. Is the change in degree also a change in kind? I'd argue that it probably isn't; other people have argued that it is. But whether online collaboration is a new thing or a variation on an old thing, one truth remains unchanged: A crowd cannot have an idea; only an individual can have an idea. You'll find creativity in the members of a crowd, but not in the crowd itself. (Though, of course, any one person's creativity builds on the creativity of many other people, both living and dead. Hence that great group achievement that we call "culture.") This is why crowds are so ill-suited to producing good art of any kind. The occasional attempts to write collaborative novels or poems online always produce hideous crap. Attempts to produce long-form videos in this way can be slightly more effective, simply because the individual pieces don't require as much integration, but, still, they're unlikely to ever rise above kitsch. Large-scale online production collaboratives have been possible, and celebrated, for many years now, but their achievements remain quite limited. It's telling that, when we discuss this phenomenon, we still almost always trot out the same two examples that we would have trotted out five years ago: Wikipedia and open-source software. I think what we're discovering is that big online groups are very good at performing time-consuming, fairly routinized tasks that can be broken up into many discrete units of work and hence sped up by having lots of people with diverse talents and perspectives working on them in parallel without much coordination. Ferreting out bugs in a complex computer program and finding and paraphrasing information on discrete encyclopedia topics both, not surprisingly, fall into this category of work. But if you're looking for the new, the creative, the moment of blazing insight, you're still going to have to look not to a crowd but to an individual human mind.