Sherry Turkle responds to Clay Shirky

Dr. Turkle is responding to this question from Clay Shirky:

So, to re-ask your question in a non-rhetorical way, under what
circumstances would we want to make the population of Deviant Art,
say, less white, or Linux less male, and if we wanted to do so, what
would need to happen?

Related to this wonderful question is the matter of online education . . . what "voice"and empowerment does it provide? I fear that as it becomes more and more the way, in tough economic times, for people to get college degrees . . . we increase inequity (of a feeling of belonging at the table) even for people we "certify."

In matters, for example of being a "crowd" that might be empowered to speak up about privacy infringements, I get a lot of "who would care about me and my little life" -- exactly not what you would want.

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Then, in response to Nick Carr's

I think what we're discovering is that big online groups are very good at performing time-consuming, fairly routinized tasks that can be broken up into many discrete units of work and hence sped up by having lots of people with diverse talents and perspectives working on them in parallel without much coordination. Ferreting out bugs in a complex computer program and finding and paraphrasing information on discrete encyclopedia topics both, not surprisingly, fall into this category of work. But if you're looking for the new, the creative, the moment of blazing insight, you're still going to have to look not to a crowd but to an individual human mind.

I like Nick's effort here to divide kinds of labor. It leaves open space for Kevin's "a team can write a script" and still, the fact that what makes a team is a group close enough together to recognize and feed off the blazing idea and the distinction between all of this and the important, but more restricted things that people can do in large-scale crowds.