The Wisdom of Crowds

The title The Wisdom of Crowds kind of speaks for itself when the main thought behind the text and author James Surowiecki is that collective thinking is more effective than individual thought. The main focus of the book is that you shouldn’t have to search the crowd for that individual to answer your question or solve a problem, but instead ask the entire crowd, as in Surowiecki’s opinion, you’ll get the answer much quicker and more often that not the crowd will be more intelligent than the individuals in them.

There is an effective diagram in a separate publication, a summary of the same book, where many arrows pointing inwards to the words surround the words ‘Collective Intelligence’, and the word ‘Expert’ has a lot of arrows pointing away from the word. In the case of the collective intelligence, it is the idea that lots of ideas go into this thinking, in order to make it better rounded and informative, whereas with one expert, it is just one person giving out their one opinion to others. Even something so simple as a diagram with words and arrows shows how effective the idea of collective intelligence can be.[1]

The idea that this type of brainpower could solve different types of problems also surprised me, as it seemed so obvious. There are the ‘Cognition’ problems, where a certain solution may not exist, but collectively a group can find and think up new alternatives. Also ‘Co-ordination’ problems are self-explanatory; the group must work together and this depends on not just what the individual thinks but the group around them also. All three link with the final type of problem, ‘Co-operation’, where the group must come up with solutions that are good for everybody. Although the three are very similar and preach the same ideas overall, their subtle differences make up the different types of collective intelligence.

What I didn’t like so much about the book was that it dismissed the fact that people could just be thrown together by chance into a group to solve the problem at hand and that it would work, but it gave a sort of checklist of conditions each individual must acquire. These included diversity of opinion, independence – to decrease the ‘herding’ mentality[2], decentralization and aggregation. I understand why these qualities are important but it somewhat dismisses the idea that certain minds can and can’t work together. The book is riddled with examples of how collective intelligence works, one of which was it’s relation to traffic jams. What many people fail to notice is how things around them have come to be. The idea that the actual road is smart because of the team that designed it, as opposed to it being down to the individual driver, really made me understand the concept a lot more.[3] The idea of a group decision rather than an individual is also reflective of the democratic system I thought, as it can be seen that a democratic society is happier and more prosperous than a society run by, say, one dictator making all the decisions. This is talked about more in the ‘Collective Intelligence and Democracy’ part, and what I found interesting was when Surowiecki talked about the actual democracy itself not representing the wisdom of the crowd, but the decision to have a democracy in the first place does.

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[1] Most Read Summaries. Summary: The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowiecki. pp. 5-6.

[2] Surowiecki, J., 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. (Abacus.) pp. 49.

[3] Surowiecki, J., 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. (Abacus.) pp. 145.

Packaging Politics

Packaging Politics is a chapter in Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy by Bob Franklin, which talks about how politics have used and continue to use the media to help move forward in their careers, specifically in Britain. He talks about the use of the ‘spin doctor’[1], specifically referring to the relationship between Tony Blair as Labour leader and Alistair Campbell, and the idea of using the media to shape politics, believing, along with Young who he cites, that ‘in the struggle to capture the public mind, spinning is the most elementary weapon.’[2] It is an interesting thought to visualise where the political world would be now without media, as it has become such a vital device in which to put information across to the voting public, whether it has a spin on it or not.

 Arguably naïve former Prime Minister Bevan believed that the publicity one received was deemed unimportant so long as the policy they backed was a good one. This may have been partly true back when he was heavily involved in the government in 1959, however Wilson, first active in the 1960’s believed that most of politics is presentation and what isn’t is timing[3], which I think is a more accurate view of modern politics. Another idea brought up in the chapter is that politics is becoming more of a consumer business than it ever has been – the idea that governments are getting better at ‘packaging politics’ in a more user friendly way to appeal to more voters. They are employing communications officers and directors to ensure that the information being given out is on point and will help their respective parties. The politicians themselves are also making themselves more widely received, for example political shows are being broadcast on television, and also politicians are not limiting themselves to purely topical shows, for example Tony Blair’s appearance on Richard and Judy[4] or more recently David Cameron’s appearance on Daybreak.

The downside to this media ‘spin’ is when critics say that the media corrupts and manipulates the information, making it more about the form of content than the content itself[5], however I think there is a strong possibility that politics were corrupted even before the media were involved. The idea of ‘packaging politics’ has stemmed from the exchange relationship between politicians and the media, where the insider information is traded for coverage in the Press, and the interesting thing is that neither are particularly dominant in the relationship, and that the two are slowly merging and we are seeing careers in both politics and communications. The two also work on a hierarchy, in that the Prime Minister or say a Cabinet member will be in the position to be interviewed by a prestige newspaper or television programme, however the lower down Party members would deal with the less known media – known as ‘press party parallelism’[6] and the two ends of the spectrum rarely collide.

The sad fact is also that politicians often use their opponents’ weaknesses to get ahead, rather than focus on their own campaigns, which begs the question; is this what politics has come to?

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[1] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.

[2] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.

[3] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.

[4] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.

[5] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.

[6] Franklin, B., 2004. Packaging Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. np.