We're All Smarter as One

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Hello and welcome to the ISTA 211 blog. My editor is out for the week, and since I am a professional blogger I’ve been tasked with keeping you updated on what’s going on with ESOC 211. We’re going to keep this as an OP-ED. The topic of our class is online collaboration, and we have topics ranging from the benefits of collective intelligence, wikipedia collaborators changing the idea of the who runs the Gringots vault of Knowledge, women on the front lines of the wikipedia trenches, issues with online roommates, and how the front page of the internet isn’t being judged by its cover. So lets take this step-by-step and see how we’re clicking and commenting on each other.

      First, I want to talk what collective intelligence. Wikipedia is the website I’d visit to start my research. I knew it was information coming from common people so it wasn’t absolute, but for the most part I knew it could be partially trusted to start the process. We read an article that mentioning that a study was conducted by the scientific journal named “Nature” that Wikipedia was only slightly more inaccurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. This changes the childhood image of is defined as factual. I used to believe it was an institution, full of handpicked and obviously very smart people, but apparently this isn’t needed and the pitfalls of limited eyes has been made known.

      Earlier in the class we read a section of a book called “Collective Intelligence Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace” by Pierre Levy, this book was published back in 1997 before Wikipedia launch in 2001 and many of his claims of knowledge have become true. He believed that the collective intelligence is continually improving and that an individuals combined become the collective intelligence.. Improving comes from diversity of thought, outsiders who bring new ideas and viewpoints that bring new questions, questions that will help guide those who are discussing what is fact. He talks about schools, the corporate world, and exclusion due to stigma and the negative connotations this can bring to our collective intelligence. These institutions any many like it are continually saying no or are trying to shape you into the same intelligence that is it, therefore stunting what our collective intelligence could be. He also believed that the digital conversation or internet would be the melting pot for all people who seek or want to contribute to knowledge. I believe the digital part is because digital implies no specific place. As I mentioned earlier, places like Britannica Encyclopedia represent an institution with a building, publishers, and the exchange of money for convenient access. Unless you have access through public means or have purchased individually you would not have access, and when intelligence is maintained in this matter it isn’t available to all therefore limiting its potential to help the collective intelligence that is humanity. While we’re on the topic of accessibility, Wikipedia even with all of its successes, has been having an issue with understanding its true potential since it is not listening to all of its collective intelligence. As I mentioned earlier, institutions can stifle our collective intelligence with constant molding making a copy of itself. Wikipedia has been suffering from something else, sexism, critiquing its female contributors of the collective in a manner not inline with how their male counterparts are viewed in. This is wasteful of our collective intelligence, leaving a stone unturned with questions not asked which therefore makes our decisions on finding what is factual that much harder.

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Levy believed that unadulterated access for all is key. Even right now as I write this, many in our country and probably millions if not more people in others are without the means to converse in our digital conversations. We are even discussing repealing laws to protect net neutrality. Remember the individual is part of our collective intelligence. So when we are having conversations about repealing a law that keeps all forms of digital conversations as equal, we are at a serious point of having a loss of our intelligence with may then having a paywall restricting may from their contribution.

      Another interesting article we read was from the Harvard Business Review titled, “How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate”. In this article author Keith Ferrazzi explains how groups can make the difference of meeting team goals to surpassing team goals and benefiting individually. Three reasonings I found interesting, adjust for size, train for collaboration, and have role clarity but task uncertainty. Now I believe a lot of people misconstrue collaboration. Usually only when money is being exchanged will a person truly follow the pattern of beneficial team collaboration. Keeping to the task and respecting others in the digital space isn’t necessary unless it is threatening your livelihood.

     

  Video Courtesy of PBS

Check out this video on the right. Ok, so if you didn’t know what Reddit was, now you know. This site obviously is a great way to find like minded people. You can start a subreddit to talk about your interest that is seemingly unpopular, or you can read from those who have explored extensively into interest that you also have. I brought up the Harvard Business Review article because as nice as reddit is, unless there is some sort of paywall or blocking that can be maintained even after a new email address, Reddit will never be the safe place that people want it to be. If there was a serious initiative for adding to the collective intelligence Reddit would probably be a good candidate, but unfortunately there is a negative side just like in Wikipedia that suffers from every ism in the book. Reddit just like Wikipedia has the “moderator”, which goes hand-in-hand with the role clarity but task uncertainty. Their role is to “babysit”. It is to keep spam, off-topic, non-constructive, and illegal topics of of the subreddits. One piece of the puzzle though is not enough to keep the machine running at full capacity. Humanity as a whole would need to take a be nice online course in order to fulfill everyones needs.