Nick Carr responds to Rushkoff

At the risk of instigating a mass digression, let me toss out at the start a problem that I often have with discussions of "the crowd": the lack of definitional precision. The term "the crowd" covers a lot of very different phenomena. There's the "social production crowd" that consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux. There's the "averaging crowd" that acts essentially as a survey group, providing an average judgment about some complex matter that (in some cases) is more accurate than the judgment of any one individual (the crowd behind prediction markets like the Iowa Electronic Markets). There's the "data mine crowd" that, usually without the explicit knowledge of its members, produces a large set of behavioral data that can be collected and analyzed in order to gain insight into behavioral or market patterns (the crowd that, for instance, feeds Google's search algorithm). And there's the "networking crowd" that trades information through a shared communication system such as the phone network or Facebook or Twitter. Each of these "crowds" (and there are surely others) has its own unique characteristics and its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Some crowds, for instance, gain their usefulness from the individual talents of their members. Others gain their usefulness by essentially filtering out those individual talents. Some crowds might be called "hives," which implies some degree of individual unconsciousness about how one's work or behavior fits into the larger whole, while others aren't anything like "hives." "Crowdsourcing" may draw on any or all of the different types of crowds, to various effects and with various ethical implications.

So are we talking here about only the "social production crowd," in which people consciously work together on some specified product, or are we free to range all over the crowd map?