Social Media week5
Wisdom of the Crowd
updated last: March 09
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009
What You Need To Know About This Course
week 1 Histories of the Internet
week 2 Histories of the Internet and World Wide Web
Social Media, Cyber Clustering, and Social Isolation
week 4 Participation: Benefits, Numbers, and Quality
week 5 Wisdom of the Crowd Versus Collective Intelligence
The Web 2.0 Ideology
week 6 Art and Social Media
Political Net Activism
What Does It Take To Participate?
Got Ethics? Labor, Work, What?
week 11 week 14
The Power of Users
week 13 Net Neutrality
week 12 Near Future Scenarios
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009
Who Cares? Social Media in Numbers. The Benefits.
Rosen, Jay. quot;PressThink: The People Formerly Known as the Audience.quot; Department of Journalism
at New York University. 27 Jun 2006. 16 Jul 2007
Wisdom of the Crowd versus Collective Intelligence. The Wisdom or Ineptitude of Internet Users
Lanier, Jaron. quot;Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier.quot;
Edge. 30 May 2006. 31 Jul 2007 <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html>.
quot;Reactions to Digital Maoism. Many-to-Many:.quot; Many-to-Many:. 3 Feb 2006. 27 Jun 2007
What is the difference between quot;collective intelligencequot;
and quot;the wisdom of crowdsquot;?
What is the difference between the
Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence?
produced quantiﬁable data
“There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing
different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is
dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict.
And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own
information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.”
“the aggregation of information in groups, [results] in decisions that…are often better than could have
been made by any single member of the group.”
-The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
Does the Wisdom of Crowds work for politics?
quot;given a large enough and varied
population offering up their best
estimates of quantity or probability, the
average of all responses will be more
accurate than any given individual
quot;The [Intrade] markets offer a great way to track the market-based consensus on political and current events. People put real money on the line in making
predictions, which is better than snap judgments in opinion polls or no-stakes views of pundits.quot;
Tom Gallagher, ISI Group
What happens when you “... outsource the prediction of stock market to a crowd” ?
When you run SETI@home (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) on your computer,
it will use part of the computer's CPU power, disk space, and network bandwidth. You
can control how much of your resources are used by SETI@home, and when it uses
The Wisdom of the Crowd does not work for art.
> 50 million views
Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time
#2. Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend
Lavigne circulated versions of this video
in various languages
Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend (Portugese Version)
Avril Lavigne Girlfriend Novia en Español
“networked culture gives rise to new structures of power which stem from the ability of diverse
groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations, and
through such a collaborative process, reﬁne their understanding of the world.”
Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/collective_intelligence_vs_the.html
-correct, evaluate each other's contributions
John Udellsʼ screen cast shows the gradual reﬁnement of a Wikipedia article-- collective intelligence at work.
Tapping into the wisdom of crowds through game play
“What he showed was a mockup of a Star Wars Galaxies medical
screen, displaying real medical imagery. Players were challenged to
advance as doctors by diagnosing the cancers displayed, in an effort to
capture the wisdom of crowds. The result? A typical gamer was found to
be able to diagnose accurately at 60% of the rate of a trained
pathologist. Pile 30 gamers on top of one another, and the averaged
result is equivalent to that of a pathologist — with a total investment of
around 60-100 hours per player.”
-- Ralph Koster
Flickr users create meta data for photographs from library of congress.
The Random Pick of the Day
Do you mind exposing yourself to
random links by people you don’t know?
Consensus Web Filters
The Importance of What We Care About
(What Do We Pay Attention To?)
“babyman,” a Digg.com power user, disproportionally determines what gets attention on the site
Andrew Sorcini, a.k.a. Mr. Baby Man on Digg.com,
joined Digg on December 27, 2005. Since then he
“dugg” 106,266 stories, commented on 2,052
stories, submitted 10,349 stories, made 2,848
Text stories popular, gained 11,095 fans, and had his
proﬁle viewed 262,813 times.
Not everybody contributes.
The participatory segment of Web 2.0 as a percentage of all
users on the web increased from 2% in 2005 to 12% in 2007,
resulting in a growth of 668%
“150000 videos are uploaded to YouTube per day (Wesch 2008).
Between 1 and 2 million photos are uploaded to Flickr each day
(Flickr main page)”