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Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

Collective intelligence and shared memory in internet may help improving intercultural relations

diciembre 7th, 2011 · No hay Comentarios

The concept of collective intelligence emerged in the late 1990 from the work of theorist as Pierre LévyDouglas HofstadterPeter RussellTom AtleeHoward Bloom and others. This idea comes from the cooperation of individuals from one species. This kind of intelligence refers to sociology, business and computer science. 

Collective intelligence and memory are terms that in many cases are related to the internet activity. These collective elements would be good tools with the intention of achieve a more intercultural world though the use of the internet because it is an effective way of communication necessary for interculturalism. Like that, some internet web pages as social networks might maintain relationships between different cultures getting an intercultural collective intelligence.

The study of collective intelligence was initially belong to sociology, and more concretly to mass behaviour. Nevertheless, with the apparition of the internet the same phenomenon has occurred. There are some researches available as the Soraya Sacaan one, that inform about the collective intelligence of society taking into account social studies of the social activity on the internet, concretly social networks and microblogs.

“La hipótesis que formulaba en aquella época, cuando pocas personas utilizaban internet y cuando la web comenzaba a nacer, era que la interconexión de ordenadores sería un vector de perfeccionamiento y aumento de la inteligencia colectiva. Digo aumento antes que creación porque la inteligencia colectiva es practicada por los seres humanos desde que disponen de lenguaje y cultura. Sólo somos inteligentes colectivamente gracias a los diferentes saberes transmitidos de generación en generación. Sencillamente, internet es mucho más potente que la imprenta, la radio o la televisión, porque permite una comunicación de tipo transversal y una mejor explotación de la memoria colectiva.”

Pierre Lévy, ” la inteligencia colectiva, nuestra más grande riqueza

As French antrophology says, the collective intelligence comes from the beginning of cognitive process of humanity. The same process is happening with the apparition of the internet. Nowadays this concept is wideworld spread ashamed by social networks, blogs, microblogging, wikis, etc.

The collective intelligence affect to the intercultural relationships in the sense that all cultures are in contact and the use of internet promotes it. Referring to the contact, it may have good or bad results depends on different factors. The interculturalism is trying to stablish relations between the diferent cultures with the intention of remark the similarities, increase the knowledge about the “others”, promote the dialogue with the intention of achieve the living together and denying the simple coexistence.

“Antes de adentrarnos de lleno a definir la interculturalidad desde el punto de vista de la semiótica, primero definiremos cómo se entiende la noción de cultura, para ello confrontaremos a tres autores: Clifford Geertz, Umberto Eco y Iuri Lotman. El primero desde el punto de vista netamente antropológico sugiere comprender la noción de cultura a partir de un concepto semiótico, sin embargo no precisa las características de este tipo de estudio. Por un lado, Eco, plantea que el estudio de la cultura debe realizarse a partir de aplicaciones semióticas específicas, como son la teoría de los códigos y la producción de signos mientras que por otro lado, Lotman propone comprender a la cultura como una memoria e inteligencia colectiva que tendría dos características fundamentales: la comunicación y su carácter de sistema.”

(Ausberto Aguilar Challapa en Comunicación y semiotica de la interculturalidad)

The internet facilitates the communication between cultures, so that is the base of interculturalism. However, as Inmaculada Ballano says, one of the problems present here is that the contact through social networks is not physical, so the identities would be false or altered. If the identities are altered this proposal for the interculturalism would be affected because clarity would disappear and the proposal of interculturalism would be failed.

References

Filed under: Anthropology, Multiculturality, Social networks Tagged: collective intelligence, Microblogging, Pierre Levy

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