Social wisdom

The idea that people working together as a group can produce more beneficial results than any one singular person is more often than not a true statement. The online social communities of the internet have now given us endless examples of how people of varying backgrounds come together to solve problems and contribute valuable information. As well as showing us the exact opposite. Sites like Wikipedia that create their content from users and have been extremely successful at producing (for the most part) valuable and accurate data.

The keys to the success of harnessing a groups intelligence, according to James Surowieki, requires several things. First being is variety. the more varied your sources, the more the group will benefit from having an aggregation of think. A dash of random does wonders. Another key to success is to be sure that the group does assume intelligence in itself. People in nature tend heard towards the decisions of those that went first. The author uses the example of 2 identical restaurants across the street from one another. A couple walks by and chooses one based on no information, which is no big deal until the second couple walks by and sees the first couple inside one of the restaurants. 9 times out of 10 that couple will enter the same restaurant based on no other information except that people are already in that one and not the other. this then starts what is know as an information cascade. Where the right decision is socially accepted by the fact that everyone is already doing it. Which is one of the biggest cautions about trying to pull useful information from social/online networks. The best way to be a productive member of a network (according to James Surowieki ) is to keep your network loose. No not allow too few people to have too strong of an influence on your decisions. This way you will maintain most of your very valuable individuality and be of the greatest worth to the group.