Josh Porter has a good post on recent events at Digg. This is the bit that most interested me:
One is as described by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch: Digg Surrenders to Mob. Simply using the word “Mob” makes for great press. We gravitate to mobs because we know they’re messing with the Man. They’re anti-authority they’re doing what they’re not supposed to they’re pissed and fighting for their rights. We think of the French or Russian or American Revolution and we like it.
But maybe, just maybe, mobs aren’t that bad. Terry Heaton had an insightful observation: “What I find most fascinating here is the automatic assumption that chaos is evil. This is a purely modernist perspective, but life itself proves it to be false.” He argues that the so-called Mob was more like the site at its finest…that a Mob is nothing more than democracy at high speed. I tend to agree with this.
Me too. People often use words like chaos to refer to, for instance, some people disagreeing with each other in a meeting. As if it will be like the streets of Paris in 1968. The orgins of the word suggest that actually chaos was the preamble to the creation of the cosmos but the creative potential is not what people usually mean. As for Michael Arrington’s use of the term “mob”, I think he should get out more.
