JG etc.

A very good article over at Time…….

Takeaways……

TIM O’REILLY, publisher and technology advocate: Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. I think we’re at the first stages of something that will be profoundly different from anything we have seen before, in terms of the ability of connected computers to deliver results. We’re entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

MOBY, pioneering electronic musician: I have a friend whose Swedish mother–she’s in her mid-60s–goes online to meet men. I was with my friend as he drove her to the Hilton to meet a Canadian doctor she’d encountered online, and I thought, How disconcerting. Because it was 10 at night and most likely she was going to meet this guy and stay in his hotel room. Go back 50 years, and she would have been in her Swedish village, depressed, a bit lonely and sad. Instead she’s in midtown Manhattan, preparing to spend the night with a doctor, and her son is driving her to the hotel!

DERY: But there’s also an upside to sociological clustering, at least online. In the 1950s, if you had the hapless happenstance of being born gay in Oklahoma, you might have spent many a lonely night biting your pillow and cursing the heavens for making you the only gay on earth. Now any 18-year-old with a modem is just a click away from a universe of fellow travelers, and to me, that’s a good thing.

O’REILLY: The generation now growing up is going to expect access to information in a way us fuddy-duddies don’t take for granted. Some say the Net will lead to a radical democratization–power to the people–but I don’t think so. When you harness collective intelligence and the power of blogging, it doesn’t mean power to individuals. It means power to the people best able to aggregate those individuals.

GLADWELL: One of the big trends in American society is the transformation of the evangelical movement and the rise of a more mature, sophisticated, culturally open evangelical church. Ten years from now, I don’t think we’re going to have the kinds of arguments about religion that we have today. Even the fight over intelligent design, to me, is a harbinger of a trend, which is that the religious world is increasingly willing to put its issues on the table and discuss them in the context of the secular world. Let’s argue about evolution vs. creation, using the framework that secular science has given us.