Web 2.0 has created a grand collection of buzzwords and two of the most prominent have been “collective intelligence” and the “wisdom of crowds“. Both terms are closely related and have been some of the driving forces behind the success of popular applications like Digg, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and Freebase to name a few. While there are many positives associated with these aspects’ crowd behavior, there are also negative possibilities.

This struck home for me on my 4th of July drive from Princeton, NJ back to Washington DC. I’d been on a lucky roll avoiding traffic and toll backups till I arrived at the Susquehanna Bridge and traffic ground to a halt with red brakes lights flaring. I spent the next 45 minutes creeping along in a stop and go morass. As we poked along I began to wonder what the cause of the congestion would be, ranging from 1) a big wreck 2) road construction 3) DUI check point 4) a deer strike 5) Britney Spears pulled over for speeding or 6) an alien landing…

Eventually I got to the crest of a hill and saw the culprit. On the other side of the interstate, going in the opposite direction, a car had been pulled over by two cops (and the occupant wasn’t even Britney Spears). As traffic came parallel to the pulled over car everyone slammed on their brakes to have a good long look then went back to regular speed - no congestion - flowing smoothly.

In economics terms this is called “rent seeking” behavior “Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger.” In this case, cars are getting their slice of cake looking at the silliness on the side of the road and the whole cake suffers from a 45 minute delay. There are lots of examples like this where a crowd results in a negative externality - often times not intuitive like Braess’s Paradox where adding additional lanes to a highway or building a new road or bridge actually increases traffic congestion. Here the crowd all takes the new or expanded route (collectively stupid) and traffic gets worse.

We see the negative externalities of crowds happening all the time whether it is in traffic congestion or financial markets. This made me wonder what the negative externalities of crowds were on the Web. Some have posited that the negativity comes in using crowds for prediction since it means the abandonment of the scientific method. Further, that innovation rarely comes from crowds but individuals (see Schumpeter) - crowds doom us to mediocrity. Keen and others have called this the “Cult of the Amateur” or “The People vs. the Expert“.

All good and interesting points, but the traffic bottle neck on I-95 reminded me of another pitfall with crowds and their potential for rent seeking behaviour. The crowd can often focus on what is directly in front of them and not the context of the bigger picture. That is effectively rubber necking. Compare it to animals that become fixated on a “bright shiny object” - like your cat or dog chasing a laser pointer spot into the wall.

We see this all the time on the Web and in the media where some small piece of information taken out of context, is spread by the crowd, and taken as fact. There are entire websites devoted to dispelling Obama myths, and even Obamapedia a wiki for correcting Obama falsehoods spread on Web. It is a bipartisan affair and the world has been convinced by YouTube clips that Bush can hardly spell his own name or pronounce the majority of English words. Taken in context both are equally preposterous, but the crowd spreads them as gospel and we all become collectively dumber.

This is also the fear I have of hyperlocal and the narrow focus media companies have on it. If we provide hyperlocal information without context we run the risk building the local equivalent of TMZ that just serve up vacuous information. Some traditional media folks I’ve talked to feel the only place their readers want a map is when it’s delivering hyperlocal information like movie theaters and restaurants near them.

When it comes to GIS there is still a prominent fear of the crowd (a.k.a. the public) especially when it comes to creating maps and data. This goes back to the people versus the expert debate above. The fear that letting the masses in will corrupt information and result in mediocrity that cannot be worked with. The conclusion by some of the GIS establishment is that you should keep barriers to entry high to keep the amateurs out. This is the debate that has been going on over on James Fee’s blog in regards to what we’ve been trying to do with Finder!. I won’t try to reproduce it here, but the debate between the wisdom and/or stupidity of crowds is alive and well.

I have not convinced myself that traffic congestion, rent-seeking behavior, crowdsourcing and hyperlocal actually all connect well together, but we’ll see what the crowd dictates (sarcasm here).

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