The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy

Chapter 4

Creative Conversation

This chapter explores the creative conversation from which human collective intelligence is emerging in the new digital communication environment and looks at how it functions and possible improvements. Creative conversation is the fundamental engine of knowledge communities, that is, communities seen from the perspective of their cognitive functioning. The first main idea put forward in this chapter is the inseparability of collective intelligence and personal intelligence. This idea is expressed in practical terms in the dialectical interdependence of social and personal knowledge management. Second, I stress the growing role of creative conversation in explicating, accumulating and organizing knowledge in the shared memories of knowledge communities. The chapter concludes with a third key idea: that the technical and social conditions for the collaborative construction of memory on the Web force us to radically rethink our traditional ways of organizing archives. Memory beyond the Web calls for a new symbolic medium for creative conversation, an open, universal, democratic and computable semantic sphere.

4.1. Beyond “collective stupidity”

Since the publication of my book Collective Intelligence in 1997¹, I have continually met with the classic (and, in my opinion, weak) objection that it is individual humans who are intelligent, while groups, more or less organized communities and, even more so, crowds are for the most part stupid. What are we ...