The theory that the 'collective wisdom' intelligence of a group of people is higher than that of any individual can be applied to the Internet as well as social media.
So says James Surowiecki, author of 'The Wisdom of Crowds', who argues that if people are able to tap into the collective wisdom, they are better able to solve problems and make decisions. He adds that sometimes tapping into the collective wisdom also allows people to better predict the future.
According to Surowiecki, Google's search algorithm and the Twindex, a new Twitter political index, are some online examples of this theory.
Surowiecki uses an observation by British scientist Francis Galton as a starting point to argue for the importance of collaboration and the need to harness the collective wisdom.
In Galton's experiment, he showed that attendees to an agricultural fair were able to collectively predict the weight of a slaughtered ox better than any one individual attendee. He did this by taking all the guesses made by the attendees and comparing this average to the actual weight, as well as the individual guesses. The collective guess was only one kilogramme off, and closer to the correct weight than any of the individual guesses.
According to Surowiecki, Google's search engine is an example of this theory. He explains that the search engine's algorithm is based, in part, on a voting system.
He also suggests that the theory of the wisdom of the crowd ties in with a lot of the thinking in social media. He says with the advent of social media, people no longer believe they need to get their information from a small number of people or institutions.
Surowiecki also points out that social media contains a wealth of knowledge. For this reason, he says, a lot of people are looking at ways to harvest information from Twitter.
According to him, the Twindex is an example of this. He explains that the Twindex measures daily tweets that mention President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney and calculates their real-time sentiment scores based on the views expressed in their tweets.
Another way to harness the collective wisdom of the crowd, according to Surowiecki, is using online communities to source opinions, whether they are about new products or marketing campaigns.
Finally, Surowiecki suggests that big data is another example of the wealth of knowledge available from crowds. “If you think about actually harvesting the knowledge of the huge number of people globally and then using data analysis techniques to do that, the possibilities are tremendous.”
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