The use of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) might better align with this MI way of thinking, where the learner would decide which of those capacities he or she has would be of interests for development.
Why would this "binding force" be that different from what binds people together in different kinds of relationships outside of collective learning? Everyone has their own personal reasons for learning from and sharing with the collective, and these reasons are pretty similar to the reasons people learn and share in "real world" or more traditional situations.
Becoming competent could be viewed as the ability to perceive the links between these loosely related knowledge fragments
The way one navigates the knowledge on the internet expertly could be a metaphor for or, perhaps, a reflection of, how the brain creates a network of knowledge to become an expert in any environment or domain.
Perhaps more importantly, if learning is to become more self-regulated, rather than teacher-regulated, what sorts of mindsets do learners require to take control and self regulate their own learning (Zimmermann & Schunk, 2001).