Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence

I found a story on Poynter.org, that demonstrates Levy's "integrated dynamic". The article, written by Craig Kanalley, is called, "Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News Posted."
You can view the article here: www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=173078

Kanalley explains how journalists can benefit from social media, like twitter. In the story, a Texas newspaper called The Austin American-Statesman, used Twitter to link up with various other groups to report on the Fort Hood shooting incident, in real time. No event had ever been covered in this way, because Twitter lists are new to the public. People worked together like never before to break the news of the situation. Levy writes, "But real-time democracy is organized not around the vision of power over a society...but the communication of the community with itself, knowledge of the community's self." In the case of the Fort Hood coverage, the role of the digital journalists was to organize and analyze the information that was streaming on Twitter, and to post new information whenever it was available. Journalists were responsible for evaluating the information and making connections between bits of information. The digital journalists became listeners and collaborated with members of the general public, as well as representatives from other organizations, in order to produce thorough coverage of the incident.

Levy predicts, "New forms of writing will be developed." This was proven true with the coverage of the Fort Hood shootings. Kanalley wrote in his article, about the amount of traffic on the Fort Hood twitter lists, "Quigley wasn't entirely surprised by the rapid growth, citing Twitter's potential as a "viral medium" and its snowball effect once something takes off on retweets." The term "viral medium" is a good description of how information gathering occurs on the Internet. In the book review from Amazon.com, included with Levy's "Collective Intelligence," article, reads, "Levy insists we are in the early moments of an historical paradigm shift of the manitude of the Renaissance." This is really exciting, and I do think that we have just seen the beginning of the potential of online interaction.