A while back I linked to a post on Edge.org by Jaron Lanier that attempted to bring a little caution to all the excitement about the Web 2.0 user-driven world that is all the rage of late. A rage that I, myself, am very intrigued by.

In the upcoming Newsweek, Steven Levy addresses this critique and the backlash that ensued.

He writes…

But the output of such efforts, says Lanier, is often a mundane reflection of the lowest common denominator, an inevitable consequence, he writes, of the “stupid and boring” hive mind. Not surprisingly, the targets of his criticism are crying foul.

“Lanier is objecting to the writing style of the Wikipedia being neutral rather than biased,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder. Wales admits that sometimes the lack of an all-controlling editor leads Wikipedia to sometimes indefensible imbalances (for instance, the entry on “Star Trek”’s Mr. Spock is more than twice as long as the item about Flaubert). But he contends that’s just a temporary effect of the geeky flavor of the burgeoning Wikipedia community in this early stage. Author Kevin Kelly also thinks that Lanier’s criticism is off base. “The hive mind can’t do everything, but it’s not stupid and boring,” he says. “There’s no evidence that it subsumes individual expression.”

Kelly’s point is well taken—the same powerful Internet technology that aggregates our behavior also empowers us to assert ourselves individually. There has never been an easier way for people to distribute creative content. Lanier has done us a service by warning that the pedestrian preferences of the hive mind all too often overwhelm the truly essential. But let’s face it—Chairman Mao would have hated the Internet.

So, yes, don’t be blind to the drawbacks of the user-driven world. But don’t deny that we just might be living in a truly revolutionary time of human history.

A perspective with which, I think, Lanier would agree.