KnowledgeCafe

Voor het Zuidafrikaans blad “Journal for Convergence” verzorg ik sinds een paar jaar het ‘guest editorship’. Hiervoor heb ik juist een nieuwe bijdrage afgerond over de “wisdom of crowds”-manie.

Zie hieronder voor een copie van deze bijdrage! Benieuwd naar reacties, het is een beetje controversieel voor al wie *heilig* gelooft in Web 2.0…

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Ever seen a wise crowd?

A plea for personality and against shallowness, by guest editor Rik Maes.

Ever since James Surowiecki wrote his ostentatious bestseller “The Wisdom of Crowds”[1], arguing that the aggregation of information in groups quite often leads to smarter decisions, this term has been used as a panacea[2] for innovation through the almost sponta­neous gene­ration of collective wisdom. But is he right and, if so, why didn’t he prepare his book in the same manner?

Admittedly, my personal information space has substantially changed into the direction of collectivity: from finding information based on Google’s page rank algorithms and buying books more relying on Amazon’s than on the publisher’s recommendations, to the use of social soft­ware like del.icio.us’ bookmarking and wiki’s as cooperative teaching aids. My confidence in expert-based information is complemented with conditional trust in self-reg­ulating, mass-based mechanisms: a step organisations still hesitate to take, locked in as they are by their control-based trust in primarily internal sources of informa­tion. But is this shift the forerunner of a wider and above all deeper belief in the wisdom of crowds or simply the application of time-saving, versatile tools? Do these aids help me in containing my infor­mation overload or do they on the contrary contribute to it? Do they effectively save time, or am I wasting my time in using them? Does the alleged wisdom of the crowd contribute to my own unfortunate wisdom or is the opposite all the more true?

Maybe we just have too high expectations of crowd-based, participative organizational mo­dels as alternatives for hi­erarchical, bureaucratic organizations. In a straight interview[3] with three leading practitio­ners of Wikipedia, “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” and flag­ship of crowd-based in­ventiveness, it is said that “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing”. Its increasingly complex governance structure, filled with numerous roles, voting procedures and arbitration policies, leads to a situation where e.g. the deletion of an entry in the encyclopedia is “an elaborate process: the page with deletion rules has 37 pages plus 20 subca­tegories of rules” (quote; actually, it has already one page extra![4]). A perfect ex­ample of how David can become Goliath!

A more serious snag of the dawn of blogs, social software, image and audio sharing, me­ta-tagging and “mash-up” websites and other components of the ill-defined (if defined at all![5]) Web 2.0 phenomenon - all incarnations of crowd-based thinking -, is their obvious lack of more than anecdotic interest and relevance. Only a very minor fraction of all entries in blogs, Flickr, My­Space, YouTube, del.icio.us etc. are more than narcissistic self-documen­tation, crav­ing for con­tact, accumulation of popular references of little or no substance, blog-re­stricted discussi­ons among like-minded sympathizers and outpour­ing of meaning­less as­sents. Apparently, mashing-up (a modish term for “ combining”) is not creating, tag­ging is not reasoning and blogging is not writing as writing is more than reacting to yester­day’s opinion: writing is meant to last. Blogging is the surest way to getting forgotten: the next Wittgenstein (or Pi­casso, or Neruda, or…) won’t be re­minded for his weblog! Not a single blog-entry will ever change my life as much as reading Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” did. Wheth­er we like it or not: Inter­net is primarily a world of facts, not of reflec­tion; it is a world of now and not of history. Crowds can deliver momentary evidence, not wisdom.

The ephemeral belief in the wisdom of crowds is a symptom of market thinking and of risk avoidance. The core conviction that the more people are involved, the better the result will be, is very similar to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” steering the economy. This argument is taken the edge off in the above-mentioned interview: “What about the ‘collective intelli­gence’ or ‘collective wisdom’ argument: that given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve. Does this hold true for Wikipedia? No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic”. Or: Adam Smith’s economy as well cannot without risk-taking entrepreneurs as the motor of innova­tion and progress!

More alarming is the institutionalized trustworthiness that is given to the collective mind. New pop stars and even the chef for a new restaurant are chosen through crowd-based vot­ing contests. The winners are either congenial or corrupt (or both), but are they top quality? Would the Beatles have won a similar contest and if yes, would they have last? More and more pro­grammes of even renowned universities can successfully be followed through Googling and participating in wiki’s, mainly disregarding the insights and subtle nuances of considered opinions found in books and scientific articles and paying no attention to the value of the autonomous formulation of one’s own well thought-out understanding. Be­coming the ag­gregator of the collective is a safe way to be considered a global intellectual, but does it make you a wise man?

Does all this mean I don’t believe in facets of collective intelligence? No! I do not believe in whatever wisdom of “hive minds” or in the aggregated wisdom of crowds. The stupid and even shocking popularity lists found at pop­urls.com, the aggregating web­site of social software-based websites, decisively confirms my opinion. I do believe in the collective of communities, inspired and guided by well-meaning individuals and in their turn empower­ing each of their active members. The balance of individual personalities and communities is at the heart of any real human development. But crowds are not communities and, fortu­nately, communities are not crowds. As Buber already said: “All real living is meeting”.