Crowd wisdom, social knowing - the future of knowledge?

I've been hearing a lot about 'crowd wisdom' lately. Actually, I've been reading about it. It was chapter seven of "Everything is Miscellaneous" when Weinberger mentions something called 'social knowing', which spawned my search on this kind of knowledge.

We had already discussed it early in the semester - you guys remember, when we had to split into groups and talk about the definitions of/differences between 'knowledge' and 'information'. I remember my group touched on the idea of knowledge being something that is collectively arrived at and agreed upon. I loved the idea of this during the discussion and that was probably why I was so excited to read about it in David's book.

I really like when David mentions the editors of a major newspaper collaborating to figure out what should be on the front page versus social media websites like Digg and Reddit where users choose, mainly through popularity of articles, what appears on the main page of the sites. He says: "enabling groups of readers to influence one another's front pages not only brings us more relevant information, it also binds groups socially'.

This reminds me of a point made in one of our readings this week, "Give Plagiarism the Weight it Deserves" by William Badke. He has this idea (that I'm sure is shared by many, although I never thought of it this particular way until reading his article) that research is a dialogue between researches, not several monologues from specific researchers. Knowledge, too can be a dialogue with the emergence of our digital age.


Some websites to check out:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129777531 An interview with Len Fishers, author of "The Perfect Swarm", a book that discusses "swarm intelligence" (an idea that feeds off of and into "crowd wisdom").

http://www.cio.com/article/615084/Finding_Stuff_Online_20_Years_of_Innovative_Search_Engines?page=1#slideshow Just a cool slideshow I found showcasing the change in internet search engines over the past twenty years. I can only remember the ones from the past fifteen or so, but it's really cool to look at how searching for information digitally has evolved so quickly.