As Michael Strangelove put it in The Empire of Mind, the allowing of all voices an outlet via the Internet weakens the “hegemonic construction of reality.” Huh? Simply put in less academic language, Michael means that we’re losing the centrally located, “objective,” liability-fearing, repository, reference points of reality.
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What we’ve arrived at here is that online groups really are more “crowd” than they are “community.” From what I’ve just discussed, you can see that online groups are a hybrid between the two, but favoring the crowd side of the “social DNA” rather than the community. To revisit some rhetoric from the 2008 presidential campaign and a standard American culture cliché, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” So call it a community if you like, but I think it’s a crowd. The author of the article, who claims to be a neuroscientist and is known only to the world as Patrick, opines that online communities such as those at Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com are not really “communities” at all. He says that they are crowds. Even though this article amounts to not more than water-cooler chat, just as brand redefinition is a business threat, so is the fact that understanding of the issue is so low. A double whammy. It’s usually what we don’t know that hurts us the most. There are “brand anti-evangelists” out there. I’ve read them. You’ve read them. They come in different flavors and sizes. Their motivations and goals are all over the map. But there’s one thing they all have in common . . . |
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