“_If you listen to fools,
The Mob Rules_”

–Black Sabbath, The Mob Rules

…or When the Wisdom of Crowds Fails.

So I’ve been watching with morbid fasci–err, I mean abundant intellectual curiosity on the recent kerfluffle/dustup/brouhaha between Digg and Steve Mallett of O’Reilly. I don’t know the full story, but as an online journalist, I feel both qualified and compelled to comment. ;)

Digg’s…what, a year old now? So, yeah, it’s a small community, getting bigger each day. It’s not quite the “Slashdot killer” for two reasons:

  1. There’s enough room in the online ecosystem for both.
  2. The simple fact that at this stage in the Digg community’s evolution, the necessary checks and balances haven’t arisen.

I’ll probably riff on the first bullet at some point in the future (until then, consider that email lists are still going strong in the age of push-button publishing).

Near as I can tell, there’s no order or strata to the Digg community. Right now, the Digg Nation is simply content to share in the experience together. So when the tribe perceives a common “threat”, the response is to come together and repel the threat as one.

Not having read Surowiecki’s book, I’d say that one of the fundamental weaknesses to any crowd’s collective intelligence is a common bias which leads to a snap judgment before all of the facts come to light. This conclusion is reinforced ad nauseum until it becomes a belief.

If anything, this whole experience has been a good lesson and has raised some important questions. How often does the collective wisdom fail a community? Are there necessary checks and balances both within and outside the community to prevent false conclusions from causing harm? If damage is done, can another collective viewpoint reverse it?

This isn’t enough to discredit the notion of collective intelligence, though I think this and other examples will drive home the point that even the wisdom of crowds can be built on a shaky foundation of false perceptions.