Social Media and The Wisdom of the Crowd Postings

Social Media and The Wisdom of the Crowd Postings
After Finishing Digital Nation and Reading "Social Media and Web 2.0" and The Blog Posting on Transparency in Social Media

I would like to pose the Following topics taken from online talks from boingboing.net about "the crowd" - particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. 

TOPICS LIST:

Open Source and Crowdsourcing.
What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities on behalf of a corporation or organization? Has the open source movement created new forms, or just copies of old ones? What are the possibilities, here, for new cultural and economic institutions, and how might they be improvements on the status quo? 


Whither the Individual?
As we join groups and social networks from affinity sites to Facebook, are we extending and expanding identities, or increasingly conforming to the cookie-cutter profiles demanded of these interfaces? Is the loss of "personal space" and "reflection" so many users complain of merely the necessary surrender of "ego" as we learn to participate as members of a more evolved "collective organism" of "hyper-people?"

Folksonomy and the Folks.
Everybody is, indeed, here now - but should everyone be here? Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? Do collective online activities promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies, or rather to they lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions? Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside?

choose one of the above topics for a blog posting on the topic equivalent to about a 3 page paper ..

You can take a positive or negative stance towards your chosen topic, but you need to back up your opinions with examples from valid sources, such as the reading on social media, Rushkoff's digital Nation and other in class topics--This means to include links to your sources.

After that I am going to have you respond to each others blogs in the form of commentaries. 

First Posting is Due Monday the 28th