What relationship can you draw between the ideas of the global village Essay

What relationship can you draw between the ideas of the global village and collective intelligence and how will this impact your professional work - Essay Example Thus, we no longer live in unconnected and detached spots but a ‘global village’. Furthermore, this participation makes what we call ‘collective intelligence’ possible, and that is what is discussed below and how it impacts our lives. What collective intelligence means is that the intelligence of individuals and groups can be pooled together and used in several powerful ways. The actual concept was propounded by Levy (1997) though it is a part of the spiritual concept of ‘collective consciousness’. It was envisioned that networked computers would be able to enhance the totality of human knowledge in a number of ways – by â€Å"facilitating interaction among people†¦[and] promoting [their] participation† (Brand, 2007), and allowing the construction of ‘super databases’. McLuhan (1964) and Boorstin (1978) suggested long ago that we would be living in a ‘boundless global village’ because they foresaw the potential of electronic communication and the evolution of computers and the Internet. The former saw the global village as extending â€Å"or nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned† (Symes, 1995). Building on from the earlier World Wide Web, it is evident that a new phase has been reached named as Web 2.0 To take advantage of or ‘harness’ this collective intelligence, many businesses for example have moved entirely onto the Internet and are applying its principles to achieve what they could only imagine before. Thus, another feature of Web 2.0 is the building of special applications that â€Å"harness network effects [to] get better the more people use them† (O’Reilly, 2006). One example of this is the online ‘Wiki’ encyclopedia whose information rests on user contributions (wikepedia.org) The ‘wiki principle’ in general is inviting for people to participate as it gives them power to make useful