Distributed expertise

The current issue of Vanity Fair has an article (by David Rose) on the crash of AA Flight 587 a few months after 9/11. The point of the article is that the FAA’s explanation (pilot error in reaction to turbulence from the aircraft in fron of it) is very likely wrong. And the FAA is being suspiciously protective of the data it holds. In fact, suggests the article, there are structural problems with the aircraft. (I could swear I read this same article a year ago, maybe in the NYer.)

Anyway, the article supplements the data the FAA has released with information from a site where “a network of aviation experts, former crash investigators, pilots and engineers” analyze information from multiple sources, trying to piece together what actually happened.

Networked markets are smarter than the companies they’re talking about and networked experts know more than the government wants them to know.

Conversation is In

Because I am a Cluetrain guy, I am unnaturally alert to the discovery of convesation, for the central idea of that decentralized book builds on Doc‘s insight that “markets are conversations.” So are businesses (as Fernando Flores said, although in a different way) and so is the Internet itself. This idea struck us four authors as especially worthwhile given business’ insistence on understanding the Net as a type of ultra-cheap broadcast medium.

So, it is almost certainly only a coincdence that in the current issue of The New Yorker (a double issue for Aug. 19 and 26), Adam Gopnick’s excellent-as-usual article on cooking ends with this insight:

Searching for an occult connection between cooking and writing, I had missed the most obvious one. They are both dependencies of conversation. What unites cooks and writers is that their work flows from the river of human talk around a table…I enjoy the company of cooks, I realized, because I love the occasions they create for conversation.

Not all that sensible, perhaps, because Gopnick should then equally enjoy the company of furniture makers and farmers. But, I like the reveling in conversation.

Then, putting that magazine down, I picked up the NY Times Week in Review and read an article called “The Selling of America, Bush Style” by Victoria de Grazia about the Bush administration’s attempt to “rebrand” the US. She points to two obstacles. First, “there are now so many competing mesages…” Second,

…advertising messages in themselves have so little bite. They are like one-way streets. Effective cultural exchange, by contrast, depends on engaging others in dialogue.

Jeez, maybe Cluetrain was right! Is the Internet spreading the cult of conversation, which is, after all the second most basic form of human sociality.

Categories: Uncategorized dw