Is the connected generation too easily abandoning the individual for the wisdom of the crowd?

… collective online creations like Wikipedia have made the Web less expressive by absorbing the efforts of hordes of volunteer authors into an overly regularized scheme. I miss the challenging quirkiness of Web sites that have fallen into neglect since the rise of Wikipedia. It’s a shame to see the Internet world increasingly diffracted by a single organizing principle, when the whole point of the Web for me is to experience the strangeness of other points of view. (I find blogs and other recent online fads both overly structured and too transient to replace the odd, revelatory worldviews laid bare in the original generation of Web pages.) – Digital Maoism Revisited – Jaron’s World HT: Kenny, for bringing this article to my attention)

Does this question even matter?

This is a tricky subject, because I think there is something to it, but I’m not quite satisfied with the analysis set forth by Jaron and others. Wikipedia does open up new opportunities for the individual to play a great role in society. Does the form of that contribution, the homogeneity of it, the appearance of it as the thought of the crowd, detrimentally diminish the agency of the individual? I don’t think so.

I find it easy to abandon the discourse of the individual versus the crowd, because the individual appears to me to matter as much to the crowd as the crowd to the individual. They are equal wholes. And then again, that is also why I am interested in the subject. I don’t want to see the individual annihilated in the crowd, nor the crowd annihilated in an individual.

Jaron interests me on the subject of congealing forms. The form of the computer, with files, directory hierarchies, windows, binary, style/content splits, these things and more seem to be forms that are curiously accepted as if inalienable. Again, this may be challenged. Nintendo’s Wii shows that a commitment to the forms of speed, graphics power, and the joystick controller can be successfully challenged [1]. Wikipedia is also a challenging form – standing against Britannica.

The wisdom of crowds also has a powerful contender that remains fundamentally unchallenged. Is the lure of the charismatic leader any less potent today than yesterday? [2] I was thinking this morning about the authority of Steve Jobs and wondering what upon it is founded.

Funny how Maoism has become a buzzword for the “wisdom of the crowd” discourse, when the word could not be said out reference to one individual.

What do you think? Where does the individual fit in here in the trajectory of cyberspace and tech dev?