What do you think of the move away from the wisdom of the expert and towards the wisdom of crowds? (Tags = blogpostwk9, blogpostwk9n4)
We no longer trust experts. We’ve been fooled too many times. Politicians have made too many promises they haven’t kept. We see TV shows and news stories where experts took the witness stand in court and were later proven wrong. Doctors have made mistaken diagnoses, teachers have misjudged their students, authors have poor hypotheses that can be refuted by anyone with a habit of critical thinking. In his keynote message at the Netspeed conference last week, Jesse Hirsh commented that our society is moving away from “so-called experts” as authorities to the social wisdom we find within our online communities. The Internet is our authority now. If we want an answer, we can find ratings, reviews, recommendations, and derive our interpretation of the truth from the voices we choose to listen to--rather than take the advice of one mere “expert” who may have an agenda or want to sell us something. And experts often cost money, whereas our peeps--our online communities--often offer up their opinions freely, at no charge, to benefit the community. We like authorities who do not require anything of us in return.
Libraries and other collaborative communities have found that opening their collections up to crowdsourcing can have very positive results. Next-generation OPACs like Bibliocommons give users resource discovery options via other library users’ online opinions (Tay, 2009). Allowing members to tag items in a collection can make a collection more accessible, less institutionalized-feeling (Chun et al., 2006). And this open sharing of information & opinion is where business is headed, too; it worked for Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp (Tapscott & Williams, 2007). So this is what people want and what they respond to--the ability, the spaces & places, the invitation to get what they give online--information offered up at its point of need.
We no longer trust experts. We’ve been fooled too many times. Politicians have made too many promises they haven’t kept. We see TV shows and news stories where experts took the witness stand in court and were later proven wrong. Doctors have made mistaken diagnoses, teachers have misjudged their students, authors have poor hypotheses that can be refuted by anyone with a habit of critical thinking. In his keynote message at the Netspeed conference last week, Jesse Hirsh commented that our society is moving away from “so-called experts” as authorities to the social wisdom we find within our online communities. The Internet is our authority now. If we want an answer, we can find ratings, reviews, recommendations, and derive our interpretation of the truth from the voices we choose to listen to--rather than take the advice of one mere “expert” who may have an agenda or want to sell us something. And experts often cost money, whereas our peeps--our online communities--often offer up their opinions freely, at no charge, to benefit the community. We like authorities who do not require anything of us in return.
Libraries and other collaborative communities have found that opening their collections up to crowdsourcing can have very positive results. Next-generation OPACs like Bibliocommons give users resource discovery options via other library users’ online opinions (Tay, 2009). Allowing members to tag items in a collection can make a collection more accessible, less institutionalized-feeling (Chun et al., 2006). And this open sharing of information & opinion is where business is headed, too; it worked for Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp (Tapscott & Williams, 2007). So this is what people want and what they respond to--the ability, the spaces & places, the invitation to get what they give online--information offered up at its point of need.
Tay, A. (2009). "Libraries and Crowdsourcing - 6 Examples." Musings about Librarianship.
Chun, S., et al. (2006). “Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums.” Museums and the Web 2006. Albuquerque, March 22-25, 2006.
Tapscott, D and Williams, A. (2007). "Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration." Business Week.
Even when we see expert these days, for example a specialist doctor, we are expected to see a few to gather multiple opinions. Experts are only human and there is something to be said about the collective knowledge of a crowd.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I had not heard of bibliocommons before! I will have to check it out further!
Bibliocommons is pretty cool. You actually get user input from ALL Bibliocommons users all over North America, not just from your own library/system. So that adds to the "truthiness" of the user-added content! It's kinda hard to get a sense of it by going to the website, so check out www.chinookarch.ca or www.epl.ca !
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