Collective intelligence is a hotly debated topic amongst those of us interested in new media. In its basic form, it is the idea that everyone has a contribution to make, and when combined those contributions can create a quality product. It is the idea that is the basis of Wikipedia, an open source encyclopedia that has been the subject of much controversy in its short lifespan. Wikipedia controversies arise when the pages of political figures are hacked to contain inaccurate and sometimes scandalous information. But its biggest controversy arose when an analysis in Nature found that Wikipedia’s scientfic articles were nearly as accurate as those in Encyclopedia Britannica.
The insult to Britannica was that their articles are usually written by the foremost experts in the field, whereas the articles in Wikipedia are written by anyone who feels that they have a contribution to make to such an article. To those who supported the idea of collective intelligence in media making, this finding supported their contention that this approach can produce quality products. There are many others who remain unconvinced.
Jaron Lanier is unimpressed by the chaotic nature of collective intelligence. He believes that consensus is never reached in making media products this way; instead the products produced are in a constant state of flux and cannot be relied upon as being 100 percent accurate. Likewise, Terry Fisher warned of the lack of stable cultural reference points that might exist in a society that openly embraced the idea of making media through collective intelligence.
To my way of thinking, these commentators miss the point on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence also exists within the production of computer software, and is known as open source. In the open source software community, developers from all around the world form teams and work cooperatively on developing software. The best example of open source software is Linux, an operating system that contains many of the same features as found in Windows and OSX, as well as some that aren’t.
This is the freedom that open source software has – nobody expects it to be perfect. So features that might be too risky for a commercial application like Windows to include can be tried out in the open source software world. Mozilla Firefox is an open source web browser, and was the first application of its kind to feature tabbed browsing. The idea of tabbed browsing caught on and now the commercial browsers, Internet Explorer and Safari feature it as well. Likewise, OpenOffice is an open source alternative to Microsoft Office and pioneered the use of an XML based file format. Now Microsoft has followed suit in the latest versions of their office suite, because OpenOffice proved that it could work well first.
The same relationship could exist between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, or between the collective efforts of citizen media and the mainstream media. Citizen journalism has already proved that it can cover some issues more effectively than the mainstream media, mainly because of the limited time and space that the mainstream media can devote to any one issue. Likewise content can be developed in a collective and if it proves popular and workable, be developed into a stable product within the mainstream media. Consequently the mainstream media could leverage the advantage that collective media initiatives give them – a testing bed for new content and a forum for extending the coverage of issues; letting amateurs with an interest in the issue run with it.
Just as proprietary software producers like Sun and Novell encourage the efforts of hobbyist software developers to create new products that they can later refine and release commercially, mainstream media organizations could foster the efforts of citizen media makers in an effort to bring more innovation and diversity into the ‘stable’ world of the mainstream media. Jaron Lanier suggests that citizen journalists need leadership from a strong independent press, but this isn’t about the mainstream media leading citizen media makers. This is about amateurs and professionals working in a symbiotic relationship to create quality media products.
