Glacial Erratics

Back in my junior year of high school, my physics teacher, who had a penchant for pausing class to say something pithy, etched the following phrase into my brain: Genius is the ability to find the connections between seemingly disparate things.    (POG)

That idea has driven much of my thinking since then.    (POH)

Phil Jones (with whom I'd been having a lively chat about purple numbers) recently found my Why Wiki? posting. He responds with some comments on his own aspirations:    (POI)

I've convinced myself recently that if there were a universe where it were possible for statements like "there are two kinds of people" to be true then it would be true that there are two kinds of people interested in developing collaboration tools. Neither better nor worse, just different. Both are necessary and useful.    (POK)

One type is interested in enabling or augmenting the subtle interplay of people found in synchronous encounters, in synchronous settings as well as extended into asynchronous settings. These extroverts are the true and hopeful believers in collaborative action.    (POL)

The other type is more interested in augmenting the individual to allow them to manipulate information so it can be found, created and then distributed in a way that it can be manipulated by others. Introverts in an augmented dialectic.    (POM)

My own predilections, fears and interests place me in the second camp. For a long time I thought the main reason was because I didn't much like people and couldn't stand the dreadful noise, small packet size and high overhead of synchronous interaction.    (PON)

There's truth to that, but my experience with Phil suggests more: The internet as a whole and personal information tools that operate with it allow us to leap great spaces between disparate places and topics to draw and discover inferences that are like sparks of genius in a giant shared mind.    (POO)

Only a diversity of tools and a diversity of people can create the complexity in the technological and social network to both enable and ensure the distant leaps between hubs and echo chambers that signal the big ideas. Tools that are focused on the individual and their tasks and interests and publish to the universe simultaneously break down hegemony and synthesize the new groups and ideas that will be built from and broken down soon thereafter.    (POP)

Thanks Mr. Riehle.    (POQ)

Update: Phil has some additional comments.    (POR)