A late thought to the thread over at Paddy's about surf clubs and the Great Internet Sleepover:
Something I said above I'd like to explain further:
"I should clarify that the context of Marisa’s and my exchange was a question on my blog about collaboration. Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split. And I was questioning whether, in the tech art arena, that made art more bland because both team members had to understand it well enough to explain it to others."
The second sentence should probably read "Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split, say, between an artist and an engineer."
The context was XYZ art. Someone noted that a lot of this bland, by-the-numbers tech art was the fruit of teams, which were "often...a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff." In reply I was conjecturing that in order to work together, the engineer had to dumb down the hardware or software theory to explain it to the artist and the artist had to dumb down the art theory to explain it to the engineer. The product they announced to the world was then doubly dumbed-down, hence XYZ art.
This would never happen with the surf blogs because it's not that type of collaboration. The surfers either (i) act as their own engineers or (ii) proudly have no skilz whatsover except roaming the internet and mashing up its by-products using off-the-shelf software.
(This comment reworded slightly from when I submitted it at Paddy's.)