James Surowiecki’s book mentioned in this chapter outlines four elements to create a so-called “wise crowd,” one that can make decisions better than experts. These include “diversity of opinion” and “independence.” Since social groups online seem to form crowds of many like-minded people, what caution would you give someone using information they find from a socialized website or resource?
When using the internet it is very easy to find what you want to read and ignore what you don't want to read. As technology progresses, people have more options to find people with opinions, beliefs, attitudes etc. that reflect their own. While technology can become a "melting pot" for people to share thoughts, meet each other, share information, it can also become a way to shut out those that don't have those same thoughts. I would caution people to try to explore social groups and sites that they may not always agree with. Using information from one site may only give you one point of view. I think its just important to understand that all opinions have value. Even the opinions one disagrees with the very most helps shape your own opinion and your own knowledge on a subject.
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Good... but... be careful about all opinions holding value. There are enough stories now of false comments and recommendations (either to boost a rating or bring it down) that we have to be careful.
ReplyDeleteNumbers, however, for now are in our favor... we still live in an age, however, that we have magazine reviews, Consumer Reports, etc. Let's see where things are in another 5 years.