Theoretical statement that grounds the observations in this post: There are two things that intelligent systems do well: learn to aggregate perceptions based on similarities, and learn to differentiate perceptions based on distinctions. The resonance that results from the coordinated action of these two tendencies is effectively the dominant hallucination that we call consciousness.
I find myself in a kind of hyper mode these days. There is a lot of stimulating writing on filtering and context. Scott Karp does an great job of expressing thoughts and feelings that resonate with my own on the recent activity. And again, I'll say that Josh Porter and Alex Barnett are really giving my noggin a workout with some excellent posts.
In addition, Tom Parish sent me over to Bradley Horowitz's post on creators, synthesizers and consumers. He has a critical point about the structure of a given community that is elegantly illustrated with a simple pyramid. The gist is, out of 100% of a community's members that receives some benefit, that vast majority (on order of 90%), can be said to be lurkers. Only 10% are active and consistent contributors, and only 1% is a creator. There is a kind of common sense notion that we really ought to be looking for ways to elevate those lurkers to contributors, but Bradley disagrees, and so do I.
For a given community, these ratios (as orders of magnitudes, if not precisely accurate as percentages) represent a healthy distribution of participants. There are two insights that flowed forth while contemplating Bradley's point. First, I hypothesize that for every person on the planet, there exists at least one community (actual or yet to be realized) which is perfectly suited to having this person as a creator, and about 10 times as many communities which would be a perfect match for this person in the role of contributor, and then, yes, 100 times as many communities that are suited for this person lurking. So while I agree with Scott that we don't want to promote creators and contributors within a community, we do want to encourage and support them in the meta-community.
Look at that pyramid again. See that tiniest pyramid at the top? Imagine zooming in and see what it looks like. It may not be an individual, but a group. And for that group, the structure is holographically/fractally reproduced. Imagine a school, in which there is one principle, several staff (including teachers), and a bunch of students. In this community, there is only one chief. But now imagine a school district. In this community, there is one superintenant, several principals, and a bunch of staff. While the principles could be said to be creators in their school, they are contributors in the school district, and they are lurkers in the national school system community. (I posted about this general thought on my scratch-pad blog this morning)
Second insight is that there is a huge wealth of relevent information and knowlege just waiting to find it's audience, and an even larger amount of irrelevent knowledge that we can safely ignore and hopefully have filtered out for us by the collective communities which accumulate and reify these info-gradients.
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