Collective? Intelligence?

Some rather disjointed thoughts about Jenkins and his concept of collective intelligence:

Jenkins finds the distinction between "media" on the one hand and "delivery devices" on the other to be particularly important. How, then, is the "new" collective intelligence anything but the old collective intelligence repackaged into a new delivery device? People have been consulting the hive mind since time immemorial. At one time, when people's community activities were more varied and took them outside of their homes and neighborhoods more often, perhaps the minds with whom they interacted brought more diverse information to the table, as well. I'm envisioning, for example, a person faced with, say, a problem pertaining to some repairs done to his home. If that person was an avid churchgoer, for example, he might as a congregation member who is a contractor a question about the usual standards for doing these repairs, a congregation member who is a lawyer a question about whether he might sue, etc. How does what Jenkins envision as the new media version of the collective intelligence do anything but perhaps add more warm bodies to that model? And is some form of electronic collective intelligence simply supposed to replace the type of community that we're allegedly losing in real life?

Also, I'm interested in considering how Jenkins's ideas about the collective intelligence might tie into the discussion about deskilling and reskilling. I think, at heart, the Jenkins model works the best when everyone is an expert about something. He refers to collective intelligence as, "the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Fine. Yet, he also argues that the difference between his concept of collective intelligence and the concept of the expert paradigm is that "[w]hat holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge- which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties" (54). What?

When Jenkins talks about how the knowledge community is this extraordinary source of energy in the community, it sounds like he's on the verge of becoming one of those people who uses crystals to heal cancer. Or maybe I'm just particularly cranky before I've had my coffee.