Frank Kogan

Having finished the Duncan Watts book you talked about in a previous column, I think that searchability is a huge issue here -- not sure if it's directedly or tangentially related. There are all kinds of trade-offs when we enter online information sharing (even granting that not everyone has constant internet access, I would assume MOST people who would join a given convo about this stuff have access to email) -- if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Denver, you probably don't have tons of options. But if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Nebraska with the internet, you kind of take what you can get -- you can dabble.

I think one thing the internet does is tend toward dabbling, so that obsession requires less grunt work than it once did. This is good in that it necessarily "broadens scopes" -- if you like girl groups and aren't just leafing through broken down jukeboxes, you're going to get information about X Y Z etc. with a google search; but this might also disperse your attention for being a collector/obsessive. You'd become a dabbler, an enthusiast.

One question I have is -- which is the better model for, say, a department of dilletantes: lots of obsessives with distinct (if overlapping) interests, or lots of dilettantes? My intuition says the former category are key "pillars" in diverse group discussion to provide some kind of expertise, with more general dilettantes making up a good portion of the group. The rolling threads are good examples of this happening -- a few pillars saturate the thread with sheer DATA (xhuxk & country, say) and the community, similarly but not as extensively interested, is occasionally (in xhuxk's case quite frequently) engaged around it.

Anyway, these questions don't come up quite as much, I'd imagine, in academic or scientific (scholarly/specialist) disciplines, though there are some interesting parallels in diabetes research. Someone like Diane Faustus, who successful reversed late-stage diabetes in mice (and is beginning human trials as of this past year apparently), amounts to a "diabetes dilettante," someone who throws ideas at walls and has a good ratio of making them stick, but isn't recognized for specialization. The majority of the scientific community (in terms of scientists) are focused on getting their work published, hence become extreme specialists, to the point that no particularly leap-and-bound-type discoveries get made at all (because no one wants to provide great sums for unknown research; whereas lots of people will provide small sums to achieve known or predictable results).