RU Sirius responds to Nick Carr

Does anybody still listen to any of The Beatles' solo albums in their entirety?

Nick Carr wrote:

"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..."

Would you argue that people have always (or long) had leisure and comforts and (by some standards) luxuries and that a civilization that broadens and spreads participation in this experience is not substantively different from a civilization in which this is experienced by a very tiny select few?

Scale = human beings. Out of those human beings arise all kinds of difference.

We're so deeply embedded in the present, that some think this time is one of special and extraordinary alienation and atomization, when the opposite is true (although there are deepening economic stresses and anxieties, as danah boyd pointed out... probably the most important point made so far but I'm not up to responding to it yet.) It's actually a time of extraordinary engagement and participation and, yes, increasingly enjoyable distractions. So I'm concerned with the experience of the individuals in the crowd who might not have had those experiences in another time. To be bored and alienated in the 1970s... now THAT was boredom. To realize you could never be heard or seen as an artist or writer or someone with a crazy idea and to give up at the age of thirty in the 1950s... I think about how that must have felt, to give up and be voiceless for life? Crowd culture... in the sense that it's participation culture, is an extraordinary salve against anomie and isolation. Yes, it's virtual. Yes, it can perpetuate other sort of anomie and isolation. But the question I always ask is "compared to what?"