[originally posted at Social Synergy Weblog]
In this post, I want to address Marc Fawzi’s “Unwisdom of Crowds” post, as part of an analysis/debate that was initiated by Michel Bauwens of the P2P blog.

First, Marc lays out his case to compare certain behaviors online to human “tribal” behavior (as in hunter/gatherer societies). The following is quoted from Marc Fawzi’s blog:

Web 2.0: Back to the Hunter-Gatherer Society

Observe: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (i.e. bloggers)

Observe: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (i.e. viral marketing)

Observe: people once again hunt and gather in a crowd (e.g. digg)

Observe: people once again group things using words like small, big, happy, sad, funny, food rather than detailed hierarchical structures (i.e. tags)

Observe: impulsive production (minimal upfront planning vs. a lot of upfront planning) is back in style (e.g. Google “betas�)

Observe: once again, sharing between people cannot be explained with the strict concept of economic reciprocity and is being explained by the egalitarian and optimistic notion that what is good for all is good for one (YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.)

These are all traits of a hunter-gatherer society, i.e. a pre-agricultural society.

Now, I’m going to address each of these points individually. Marc writes:

“Observe: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (i.e. bloggers)”

First of all, bloggers are not the primary news source for most people in our society. Mainstream broadcast media is still the primary news source. The last time that Pew Internet Research posted statistics about blog readership, for instance, was in January of 2005, and at that time blog readership was declared to be close to 27% of all internet users.

Indeed, the internet gives people more access to more information and more perspectives from more parts of the world than they ever had before in the history of human kind. And, Pew Internet Research reports that among people with broadband internet connections, the internet is the first place that they are going to for their news. In the same report, Pew states that “mainstream media organizations dominate online news sources”. 46% of of internet users access national television news sites, 39% use Yahoo news or Google News.

Furthermore, a huge amount of the material that bloggers write about is from mainstream media sources. Most bloggers are either just writing their opinions about this news from mainstream media sources, or just outright linking to it.
Marc’s next point: “Observe: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (i.e. viral marketing)”.

It’s true that many trends have spread quickly online via word of mouth. However, word of mouth message relaying online is not a one-to-one match with the way that news was spread in human tribal societies.

Word of mouth has remained a core part of communication and information dissemination throughout the evolution of human society. Examples can be given from all time periods and from all cultures. Indeed, we have retained many ancient and older traits that first emerged through many different stages of human evolution (such as burial of the dead, churches and temples, praying, oral histories) and we have re-worked these cultural behaviors into our societies as we have evolved over time. The point is that we retain problem solving from our past stages of human development as long as we find them useful.

Marc next writes: “Observe: people once again hunt and gather in a crowd (e.g. digg)”

Marc’s metaphor is not actually totally off the mark here. Especially if we consider Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad concept:

The tetrad is arrived at through a process of asking questions, based on historical, social, and technological knowledge of the subject:

• What does any artifact enlarge or enhance?
• What does it erode or obsolesce?
• What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced?
• What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential?

These questions result in a set of four effects, namely: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal.

It seems to me that this is what Marc was really driving at with his blog posting, that certain technologies being used online may retrieve qualities from the past that had been earlier obsolesced. This does not mean, however, that we have regressed into a tribal state just because Digg may retrieve some of those traits.

Marc writes: Observe: people once again group things using words like small, big, happy, sad, funny, food rather than detailed hierarchical structures (i.e. tags)

Hmmm. This seems to be insinuating that a tagging “folksonomy” is by nature more primitive, or less advanced than institutionally-created taxonomies.

Folksonomies can be as high quality as any institutionally-created taxonomy. The quality of a folksonomy or taxonomy rests upon the quality of knowledge of the people who create them. If the knowledge of participants is equal, then a taxonomy created in a more top-down form may actually have a disadvantage to folksonomies, because:

• The taxonomy may not have the flexibility to adapt to emerging changes and new innovations. The few decision makers who create the taxonomy may be at a loss as to how to effectively categorize new emergences.
• many taxonomy systems does not have the capacity for multiple perspectives and epistemologies. Folksonomies give potentially limitless room for multiple perspectives and epistemologies. This also gives them a built in flexibility to incorporate new emergences and innovations effectively.

In short, folksonomies are an advance in human communication, not a regression.

Marc wrote: Observe: impulsive production (minimal upfront planning vs. a lot of upfront planning) is back in style (e.g. Google “betas�)

I am not sure how “impulsive planning” relates to tribal or hunter/gatherer societies? I think that it can be shown that even though hunter/gatherer or tribal societies may have lacked the invention of writing, that they still retained very complex knowledge bases, and and employed intelligent decision making to a very large degree. For instance, do the seasonal and tribal group decisions of Eskimos look “impulsive” to you?

Also, I don’t think it’s accurate to equate long term “beta” software release with “impulsive”. I think that here, Marc is actually referring to what some people have dubbed “Perpetual Beta“. The purpose of keeping a software product in a “beta” stage is primarily to encourage development feedback from the users of the product. User-innovation is proven to be an avenue of superior product development. “Perpetual beta” really means “we welcome user development”.

Personally, I’d rather use products and services that welcome and take measures to incorporate input from the people who use the, than products and services that don’t.

Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation gives several examples of how user innovation has created value and quality and useful innovation in products.
Marc writes: Observe: once again, sharing between people cannot be explained with the strict concept of economic reciprocity and is being explained by the egalitarian and optimistic notion that what is good for all is good for one (YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.)

We simply cannot tar all of these systems with the same brush. It’s just not accurate. The systems are designed to allow people to share knowledge in different ways.

For instance, Digg, which Marc uses an example in his post, is a system that is primarily focused on user-ranking of links (or how many “diggs” a link gets). Digg does possess a “topic” index, but the folksonomy aspect of Digg is downplayed, while the popularity aspect is highlighted. As a consequence of this interface design, Digg tends to be used as a link popularization system. People submit things to Digg primarily when people want to try and create a “buzz” about something.

Let’s contrast this with del.icio.us. del.icio.us has an interface that focuses on the the individual creating a personal knowledge base. In fact, it takes one aspect of our personal knowledge bases, our internet book marks, and places them online, allowing us to share them with others, and allowing us to tap into the power of folksonomies at the same time. The quality of link collections is del.icio.us tends to be very good. And, the relevance of tags also tends to be very high. One reason why can be found in this quote from blog posting by Howard Rheingold to the Cooperation Commons blog (the quote is directly from this post by Trebor Scholz) :

“The social bookmarking site del.icio.us is a suitable example for the debate over individual versus network value. On del.icio.us, contributors, myself included, save bookmarks not solely because they support an imagined “del.icio.us collective;” they don’t primarily want to support the Yahoo-owned project: they contribute out of self-interest.

Adam Smith talked about individual action that benefits the collective as the “invisible hand;” every individual contribution to the general productiveness of society intends to foster individual gain and is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

While Smith is controversial, his notion of the invisible hand is useful here. A closer look at the invisible hand reveals that it does not exclude a simultaneous conscious support of a collective. The number of frequent contributors to Wikipedia, for example, is relatively small and their motivations for participation are not completely non-agonistic (pure sharing; higher goals; help humanity). Hanah Arendt argued that people have a keen interest in contributing to something larger than themselves but most contributors to this free encyclopedia are, however, driven by authorship pride — and — an urge to contribute to the public good.

An additional variant of motivation for participation is “agonistic giving,â€? which Benkler sums up with the sentence “I give therefore I’m great.” Benkler adds other types of motivations: “individualist and solidaristicâ€? (teams; assertion of my individuality) and “reciprocityâ€? (p2p networks). In the context of sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. They are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good.”

Moving on, Marc talks about how “The Crowd Has No Wisdom”. Michel bauwens deals with this effectively in his blog posting here:

“Marc Fawzi maintains that crowds exhibit either average or lowest-common denominator intelligence, but what about the cases where, and I believe that has been demonstrated in James Surowiecki’s book (and podcast), such wisdom does exceed individual intelligence. Obviously this would require a detailed look into the conditions for this to be the case.”

In particular, Suroweicki’s book theorizes the following conditions as being essential for the crowd to be “smarter” than any individual expert:

“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.”

In systems that allow peer production, but downplay worrying about what everyone else around you thinks”, the quality of the “Wisdom of The Crowd” increases.

The rest of Marc’s post proposes a representational system as a “Digg killer”. Marc proposes that:

In an application like digg (or the “digg killer� to be exact) writers, content producers, social figures, business figures, and others, who are higher in the food chain than the consumer, and who are collectively referred to herein as ‘taste makers’, should be allowed to start their own channel (or page) where they list links they think are cool. If enough people ‘bookmark’ a given page then that means that the taste-maker in question is worthy of being positioned into the system’s hierachy at a higher level than that of the consumer. The taste-makers can then rally their followers (those who use them as taste-makers) to digg the links the taste maker has chosen to put on his/her page.

This is similar to parliamentary democracy where members of the parliament have to get enough votes on a given issue from their district in order to pass it into law.

The key here is that the ‘trusted’ taste-makers get to decide which links to promote for votes from their followers.

At the same time, people in the crowd should be able to vote the taste-makers in or out of the system’s hierarchical structure by bookmarking or un-bookmarking their page.

Anyone who has followers can become a taste-maker, but they would have to replace an existing taste-maker as the system has a finite hierarchy with finite number of taste-maker positions (e.g. in the thousands.) And once someone is elected as a taste-maker they would stay in the role for a certain period before they can be voted in or out of the position by their followers (assuming another contender has nominated himself/herself for the position.)

Marc, your idea is interesting, but I prefer a system that allows me to:

• Create and grow my own knowledge base, and create my own taxonomy that has meaning for me.
• Share my knowledge base and dyi taxonomy with others
• Decide who my taste makers are based upon my own judgment

Luckily, these qualities exist in systems like del.icio.us, and CiteULike. I agree that the hybrid of Hierarchy and “crowd” works better than the crowd alone, but there are already systems that let you be a hierarchy of one in a crowd of many, and let you scale yourself into the crowd as you see fit. That is the real advantage of peer production: more power devolved to the individual. Peer production systems need not lead to a cybernetic society. How we use these tools, and how we allow them to enhance our actions, or to control us, is our choice.