The crowd has power – it can change the world.
The first thing that attracted me to the subject of crowds was a Ted talk by Alexis Ohanian (Ohanian, 2009). In this presentation Ohanian described how the users of his co-created website, reddit, affected the results of Greenpeace's poll to name a whale (the name they voted for was ‘Mr splashy pants’). The reason for the poll was part of an effort to interfere with the Japanese government’s plans to hunt Humpback whales for research purposes (Know Your Meme, 2011). The redditors (users of reddit) debatably cared about this and instead saw this as a game where the goal was to make the organization do something they did not mean to do. The other names offered by Greenpeace were ethereal sea gods’ names, and at first the poll’s deadline was extended so that the reddit disturbance would blow away. Ultimately this resulted in enough media coverage that made the Japanese government change its decision (News.bbc.co.uk, 2007). Further to that, Splashy won the competition.
What is reddit
According to the site’s Frequently Asked Question Page (Reddit.com, 2013):‘reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web.
Users like you provide all of the content and decide, through voting, what's good and what's junk.
Links that receive community approval bubble up towards #1, so the front page is constantly in motion and (hopefully) filled with fresh, interesting links.’
Using it felt like I was making a difference and I became attracted to the thought that I could, one day, find myself instrumental in positively affecting and promoting causes I deem worthy; but doing so without too much effort or commitment on my side.
My first impression of such an event unfolding in real time was Hurricane Sandy and the way individuals offered to help in any way they could (Reddit.com, 2008). Examples include people offering to come and help or letting strangers know they had electricity so they could charge their electrical devices. By ‘upvoting’ comments of people who volunteered help I increased the chances those who needed assistance seeing these offers. I may have been in another country and had no practical way of helping anyone directly affected, however, I felt I was helping in a real way.
Today we are always a part of the crowd. We do not always understand how it works, but it does.
For the purpose of this work ‘crowds’ are groups made of individuals, which have some form of real time (instantly or near-instantly transferrable) communication between all of them. Until recently that implied that they needed to be in relatively close geographical proximity. Today our information is constantly being released into a crowd; it is the online crowd that I refer to. Our mobile devices and online activity see to that. Often this happens even without us being conscious of that fact. So even when we don’t think about it, we help form it.
Next on my reading list was ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirkey.
Shirkey explains how the Internet and its modes of communication function. His main point is that ‘more is different’. The sentiment, taken from the world of physics, expresses the notion that it would be impossible to tell how an individual will behave in a group when they have only been observed in isolation . Similarly, observing the conduct of groups numbering in the dozens does not provide insight into the behaviour of groups numbering in the thousands. This is why we struggle to understand how a large crowd is affected by our actions.
Earlier I claim that crowds are people who are linked together via means of communication. Shirkey describes the connection between communication and crowds by linking amateur content generation and social relationships (Shirky, 2009) . Finding people (who we share an interest with) is very easy nowadays. If something we have to say is important to enough people, then our system of social connections will see it distributed like a ripple in a pond. On the other hand, that ‘wise crowd’ (a concept I explain shortly) will filter out any comments which only few have any interest in.
What is a ‘wise crowd’ and how did this become important suddenly.
In ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ by James Surowiecki the author tries to make sense of what makes large groups potentially superior to the individuals within it. He identified Diversity of opinion, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation as the four characteristics essential for the ‘wise crowd’ (Surowiecki, 2005). These are conditions, which our online social tools produce at all times.
Suroweicki mentions Gustave Le Bon, a 19th century thinker who famously wrote ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’. In it Le Bon proposed that crowds are to be viewed as singular units, rather than many separate individuals. Unlike Suroweicki he proposed that crowds have only the Intelligence and intellect shared between all of its members. In other words crowds act as a primitive human being would, compelled by instincts and prone to irrational senseless acts. He points out that individuals in a crowd do things they would never seriously contemplate on their own. Le Bon attributed these actions to several causes, amongst them a sense of invincibility lent to an individual by belonging to the crowd. His argument describes the individuals as hypnotized and the crowd the hypnotist. However, Le Bon could not have conceived an evolution to this phenomenon because sophisticated communication tools (such as mobile technology) did not exist in 1896.
We are becoming very connected, very quickly. If the crowd we form is wise then it wants the best for itself – the common best for all of us. By analysing our output and then re-releasing it we are giving it more information, thus helping to better the crowd. Why should we not, if we cannot avoid being a part of it anyway? It is like a single cell within a body that does what ever it can to help and improve the well being of the entire system.
The thing that baffled me the most was how could these tools for communicating on such a grand scale develop without me noticing every step of the way? These tools were developed for years but suddenly they are everywhere. Was it a gradual process or was there a key moment? I discovered what I believe to be the answer in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’, where he explains that more often than not, great change occurs near instantly when a critical point of saturation or exposure occurs. He demonstrated this effect with the example of water turning to ice:
‘Almost nothing had changed, in other words, yet and this was the amazing thing -everything had changed. Rain had become something entirely different. Snow! (p.13, Gladwell, 2000)’
Clay Shirkey identifies the tipping point for the crowd sometime in 2002 (p.153 Shirky, 2009). At some point that year, the physical location of information became irrelevant and the rate in which we could transfer it became instantaneous.
Being a part of the crowd makes sense as a strategy for humanity.
Shirkey’s final point in ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is that the political value of the increased ease of self-expression is indisputably positive (Shirky, 2009) . It is hard to decide if being able to share videos of unfolding disasters from ground zero and having tools such as Wikipedia benefits us more than terrorists hacking activity puts us in danger. However, it is widely accepted that freedom is something we desire for our society. Thus, having the ability to express ourselves freely stands positive.
In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes that what we do not know is much more important than what we do know. ‘Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened’ (Taleb, 2007). Taleb tries to make the case for how increased availability of data is detrimental to our ability to make the right choices if we attempt to do it alone . This brings us back to Suroweicki’s proposal – if there is too much information for one person to make sense of, let the crowd have a go. According to Shirkey, we are better prepared for the task as a society than ever before.
Our society has changed drastically over a very short period. We now possess better and faster modes of communication. The improved communication makes us capable of things we have yet to realise.
The crowd we form today is a powerful super organism. Its embrace on our lives and our returned embrace suggests it holds the mystery of humanity’s future. In 2002 owing to superior modes of communication we were able to isolate the SARS virus in only 5 months (p.158, Surowiecki, 2004), a feat which is credited to the collaboration between labs rather than to one particular researcher. Yet, even if you put aside what crowds are able to achieve, the fact remains that they are centred on the individuals comprising them. Today we belong to a crowd nearly all the time, and when we do so its benefits go to you and me as individuals first of all.
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