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Image created by my wife,
Carolyn. |
Our wise leader, Eric, has previously commented on James Surowieki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, in his Agency Alliance newsletter from May, 2007 titled The Benefits of Social Media.
The general premise of the book is that accuracy tends to increase as the sources of input grows. So, if many individuals are asked to guess, for example, the weight of an ox, the mean of their collective responses will tend to be much more accurate than any single response. The Ox example, by the way, refers to a specific historical anecdote involving Sir Francis Galton, a 19th century proponent of eugenics, who happened upon a local town fair at which many people were asked to guess the weight of an ox. The crowd's collective guess at the ox's weight was 1187 pounds- just 1 pound off from its actual weight of 1188 lbs! While this may not have fully thwarted his ideas of eugenics as they relate to individuals, it suggested something new about collective 'intelligence.'
| If you're an auditory learner, check out this episode from the Radio Lab podcast, which deals with the concepts of emergence and the 'wisdom' of crowds. |
Eric applied this idea, in a 'so what?' approach, to our industry- web development. Author Stephen Johnson, in his book, Emergence, agrees. He writes that the internet has shown directly, especially through the rapid ascension of Google, that as collective intelligence coheres, accuracy of results increases. That is why the more information is indexed by Google, the more likely you are to get an accurate result to your search query (provided, of course, that your search query is specific). |
The artist eternally known as BAZAR