Joi wonders about democracy and the emergent behavior of blogs, stemming partly from “all of the stuff rippling out of Clay Shirky’s comments about blogs and the power laws.”
Wow!!!
For a couple years now, I’ve been working on the hypothesis that the process that governs the way our brains think, described by William Calvin as the “emergent properties of recurrent excitatory networks in the superficial layers of cerebral cortex,” scales up in self-similar fashion to the way people work together in groups, and groups of groups — an ultimately, up to direct democracy.
Ross Mayfield describes the groupings of people at 12, 150, and then thousands.
William Calvin’s voting cerebral columns and literal evolution of thought seems to me to be a grouping of 1 brain.
Check out his book “HOW BRAINS THINK: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now.”