RU Sirius responds to Group

I'm a bit perplexed by this whole dialogue, maybe because I haven't read Nick's book and don't know anything about his perspective. The idea that only an individual can have an idea... it seems tautological. Why is it profound?

Having said that, I'll use it as a jumping off point to make another attempt to -- in my own very non-granular wide angle way -- raise the issue of distinctions between generations in terms of digital collaboration, because I think something profound may be happening. And I'm not the first to say it, but the boundary between the self and the other seems much more permeable to younger people who live their lives virtually in public. So they are likely to come as close as human beings (at least pre-"borgian" human beings) can get to "having an idea" together. In other words, I think generations that did not grow up embedded in connective media instinctively require a private place inside their heads to construct a thought, and the thought is then tightly binded to a sense of identity ... and that is no longer the case. There's a kind of disinhibition taking place now that is equally instinctive. And if the stuff that results from this sort of fast feedback social "thinking" and creativity and activity seems a bit shallow right now, maybe it's because we (as a species) are new to it.

Apropos of nothing... this all makes me think of Marshall McLuhan and how -- a long time ago -- he talked about the shift in medias from ones that privileged the literate romantic individual to ones that privilege a kind of tribalism a long time ago. And it seems we've had a series of classical intellectual panics ... about "hippies", about gamers, whatever... that seem to be, at least in part, about the classical intellectual losing his or her specialness.

R.U.