Nick Carr responds to all

I actually think that the history of the dramatic arts, encompassing both stage and film, makes it very clear that most great scripts come from individuals rather than teams. (Today, one of the great flaws in Hollywood is the increasing dependence on scriptwriting-by-committee, which usually produces rubbish.) But, of course, a good group of collaborators can play a powerful role in improving an idea or a performance. (The actors Shakespeare worked with almost certainly played a big part in refining his plays, for instance, just as the individual talents of the Beatles meshed together in a way that produced superior work than when those talents meshed with the talents of other sets of collaborators.) Minds play off other minds, often in delightful ways. But in the end, and whether or not, in retrospect, the precise dynamics of the interaction of the minds can be traced in detail, what were talking about are individual minds interacting, not some mythical "collective mind." When we speak of a "collective mind," we're speaking metaphorically, not literally. There isn't actually any real mind there, just as there isn't actually any real brain there. Human beings aren't neurons. The messages they exchange aren't neurotransmitters. These are all metaphors. And when we strip away the metaphors, we're left with the (reassuring) fact that ideas only come from individual minds, however fabulously those ideas might be modified by ideas emanating from other individual minds.

[digression]

Clay,

I believe RU was making a point about how the Beatles together made better albums than did the individual members working apart from the other Beatles. Implicit in this point is the value of the album as a form (a value that might be greater than the value of the individual tracks in isolation). So I believe that RU and I are in agreement here.

Nick