Infozen: The Dumbness of Crowds vs. Collective Intelligence
“Collective Intelligence” is all the photos on Flickr, taken by individuals on their own, and the new ideas created from that pool of photos (and the API).
“Dumbness of Crowds” is expecting a group of people to create and edit a photo together.
“Collective Intelligence” is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.
“Dumbness of Crowds” is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough.
(It’s not always the averaging that’s the problem it’s the blindly part)“Collective Intelligence” is about the community on Threadless, voting and discussing t-shirts designed by individuals.
“Dumbness of Crowds” would be expecting the Threadless community to actually design the t-shirts together as a group.
March 2nd, 2007 10:07
I am not quite sure that the dumbness of crowds analogy holds true when it comes to creating and editing a photo together. There are plenty of examples of social production in which a task is broken down into repetitious modules. Take for example SETI @Home or the NASA clickworkers programs.
This can carry over to “creative” production as well. Take the museum world, there are plenty of examples of democratized art. The question is just how the process is created… Some good examples can be found at the following URL:
http://newmuseums.blogspot.com/2007/02/museum-generated-video.html