Nick Carr responds to Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky wrote:

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.

This doesn't strike me as a counter-observation, but rather as an amplification of my point. Pull Charlie Watts out of the Stones, and they cease to be the Stones. They are not a faceless "group" of interchangeable parts. They are five individuals collaborating. (Listen to what happened when Mick Taylor replaced Brian Jones.) There is no "idea" beyond the ideas of the five individuals collaborating, ideas in many cases spurred by the act of collaboration. The work can be entirely analyzed (to the extent any creative act can be "analyzed") by the contributions of five individual minds, and talents, playing off one another. There is nothing "surprising" about this. Does one group of five individuals differ from another group of five individuals? Of course. Why would anyone suppose it might be otherwise?