Dynamic of Collective Intelligence

Pierre Levy states in his book,Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace:

"Media centric politics simply reverse the totalitarian formula: rather than organize the constant surveillance of individuals through a national party run by a dictator, it focuses our attention on political celebrities. Everyone watches the same stars; the president, ministers, journalists, media people. They are the only ones we see and hear. But real-time democracy is organized not around the vision of power over a society, but the communication of the community with itself, knowledge of the community's self."

The voice of the community is rising in power. The capability to retrieve news information is no longer limited to the nightly broadcast newsroom or the morning newspaper flung across the dewy lawn. News is being distributed through social media forums that is accessible to anyone and everyone who desires it. Society is engaging in breaking news stories, feeding sites such as Twitter and Facebook with viable information that journalists can access without having to pry, dig and interrogate people.

Tony Rogers posted a blog article that explores the ways that journalists are expanding the horizon of investigating news stories to retrieve information. The article: Journalists Use Facebook to Find Sources and Promote Stories, shows how a social networking tool can be utilized for both personal and professional matters. The blog states that many journalists are utilizing such sites as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to find sources, news stories and information that is readily available and easy to access.

Levy confirms the point that Tony Rogers conveys in his blog post by his prediction, "that we will take greater control of that value and everything related to it as we use technology to organize ourselves into what we call Living Cities. Here, physical location is less important than the interactions of its members, and not surprisingly, the lack of territorialities will challenge present methods of governance."

Welcome to the freedom of the Internet!