Re:Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely...
by coldtea on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @12:00PM
(#31004417)
>Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that.
That's too reductionist. Ultimately "humans" do it, like ultimately atoms do chemical interactions, but there are absolutely "group dynamics", they have been studied quite a lot, and an "individual" in a group context can operate totally different (and has different options, tradeoffs, etc) than an individual alone.
A very basic example: a human can forget X.
A group, on the other hand, has a collective memory (institutional memory), and even if an individual forgets, it takes many individuals forgetting to erase something.
That's too reductionist. Ultimately "humans" do it, like ultimately atoms do chemical interactions, but there are absolutely "group dynamics", they have been studied quite a lot, and an "individual" in a group context can operate totally different (and has different options, tradeoffs, etc) than an individual alone.
A very basic example: a human can forget X.
A group, on the other hand, has a collective memory (institutional memory), and even if an individual forgets, it takes many individuals forgetting to erase something.