Sep 26 2008
Web 2.0 and Wisdom of Crowds
Web 2.0 is used to describe various websites and online services that allow human users to interact with each other in different ways and from there, provide, manage, and share content. One of the most important principles in Web 2.0 is the wisdom of crowds.
What is the Wisdom of Crowds?
The term “wisdom of crowds” is best known for its use in the 2004 book of James Surowiecki. “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations” discusses the aggregation of information and how it could
lead to better decisions.
Types of Crowd Wisdom
There are three kinds of crowd wisdom which people may gather. Cognition is best exemplified by market judgment, which provides greater reliability, objectivity, and speed than expert committees and deliberations. Coordination, on the other hand, is all about gaining common understanding to produce judgments with better accuracy. Lastly, cooperation refers to how networks of trust may be formed even without the guidance or supervision of a centralized authority; that happens, of course, when people start
cooperating with each other.
Required Elements for a Wise Crowd
Of course, not all crowds may be considered wise. A crowd can only be considered so if it possesses the following elements:
Diversity of Opinion – People making up a wise crowd must have varying opinions, even if they only have different interpretations for a singular source of information.
Independence - It wouldn’t do at all if the people in a crowd tend to pander to one or are unafraid of voicing out their real opinions. People in your crowd may have diverse opinions but if they’re not willing to share them for any reason then you’d still end up without a wise crowd to depend on.
Decentralization – People making up a wise crowd are individually capable of utilizing local knowledge and possess their own specialization skills.
Aggregation – Lastly, there must be a system, device, or mechanism able to aggregate all private opinions of the crowd and turning it into a collective – and definitely better – decision.
The Wisdom of the Crowd Isn’t Always Wise
There are of course instances when the wisdom of crowd fails. It may be due to the absence of any or a
combination of the required elements mentioned above or other factors and circumstances. A few reasons why the wisdom of the crowd may fail are provided below.
Excessive Homogeneousness – People might feel a need to conform and as such, avoid give a different opinion with that of the majority.
Centralized Control – If some people in the crowd are unable to access the same information being used by others, their opinions might vastly affect the decision-making process and consequently leading to inaccurate results.
Too Many Divisions – A wise crowd benefits from richly diverse opinions but not diversity. Information must be able to flow freely if you wish to get favorable results.
Excessive Emotions – Although intuitiveness and emotional intelligence have its advantages, letting other emotions like anger and embarrassment excessively control your thoughts and overwhelm your logic and objectivity will not help a person formulate smart opinions.
Wisdom of the Crowd versus Collective Intelligence
In Web 2.0, it is very important to know the subtle but nonetheless critical difference between collective
intelligence and wisdom of the crowd. Collective intelligence makes use of a deliberation process; people
share, modify, and assess each other’s opinion until they’re collectively able to make a decision. With wisdom of the crowd, however, participants act separately and at times even in competition with others.
Here is where this lesson ends for today. We really hope you enjoyed this lesson too.
You will receive the next lesson in 7 days. Next week’s lesson will have the following title:
“Mobile Technology and Web 2.0″
Copyright(C) 2008 by John Delavera & Reimund Lube
