guest editor

Wisdom in
numbers –
or mass
ignorance?

Ever seen a wise crowd? A plea for personality and against shallowness, by guest
editor rik maes
ver since James Surowiecki wrote his ostentatious still hesitate to take, locked in as they are by their control-

E 1
bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds , arguing that
the aggregation of information in groups quite
often leads to smarter decisions, this term has been used as
2
a panacea 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
co-operative teaching aids. My confidence in expert-based
information is complemented with conditional trust in self-
regulating, mass-based mechanisms: a step organisations
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 save time, or am
I wasting my time in using them? Does the alleged wisdom
of the crowd contribute to my own wisdom?
Maybe we just have too high expectations of crowd-
based, participative organisational models as alternatives
for hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. In a straight
interview3 with three leading practitioners of Wikipedia,
“the encyclopaedia 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

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convergence vol 7 no 3

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, for
example, the deletion of an entry in the encyclopaedia is
“an elaborate process: the page with deletion rules has 37
pages plus 20 sub-categories of rules” (quote; actually, it
4
has already one page extra! ). 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, “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
sympathisers 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
remembered 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, the 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. The edge is taken off this
argument in the premise 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.
11
convergence
guest editor
More alarming is the institutionalised 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 so, would they
have lasted? 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
The Internet is primarily a world
of facts – not of reflection; it is a
world of now and not of history
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 the 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 who, in turn, empower 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 observed: “All real living is meeting.”
References:
1. Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few
and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations,
Random House, 2004.
2. The term “wisdom of crowds” counts almost three million entries in Google.
3. Riehle, D. How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley,
Elisabeth Bauer and Kizu Naoko, http://www.riehle.org/computer-
science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-interview.html
4. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_deletion
5. For a non-trivial overview, see T O’Reilly, What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and
Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
vol 7 no 3