Today, I’m minded to discuss the concept of the effect of information-sharing on the collective consciousness and individual decision-making (and yes, friends, this series of posts will probably allude to the use of social software in the success of Barak Obama’s recent US Presidential election campaign, and maybe even a little about how we can leverage social software technologies for e-learning).
Now read on…
In his seminal 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discussed the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he asserts, are often better than choices that could have been made by any individual member of a group. The author suggests that typically people look for what he calls the “single decision-maker;” an acknowledged expert who uses their judgment to provide solutions or answers, whereas the better strategy is probably to look for “as diverse and wide a pool of decision-makers as [possible].”
Table 1 Characteristics of crowd wisdom
| Cognition | Market judgment, which Surowiecki argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees. |
| Coordination | Common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture. For example, knowing the Rules of the Road has the benefit of optimizing traffic flows. |
| Cooperation | How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance. |
However, we know that not all groups are wise. Consider, for example, violent mobs, investors in stock market bubbles, or property developers in Ireland in the second half of this decade. According to Surowiecki, four criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:
- Diversity of opinion
- Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence
- People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization
- People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation
- Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
Clay Shirky (2003) asserts that there was no real means for any group to meet these four criteria until the emergence of social software:
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
It can be said that e-mail, blogs, wikis and so on are not social per se: Shirky considers that these technologies enable other communications channels including broadcasting (spam), one-to-one (SMS texting), and one-to-many (blogs), as much as collaborative interaction. More accurately, network-based internet technologies are not necessarily social, but they can support social patterns.
More…
_________________
References:
Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.
Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.
No comments:
Post a Comment