Collective intelligence is great when people contribute. Like most group work, there is always someone who is going to sit back while others do all of the work. When it comes to using the Internet, that's the group I was a part of. I had no twitter account or blogs, and the Facebook account I had was really only used "lurk". Not until this past September did I have a viable online presence that contributed in a positive way. I used the information that was freely given to me without any reciprocity. I consumed.
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| chquotes.synthasite.com |
I still don't initiate much by way of social media. I won't really reach out to someone and friend request them. I guess I fear them rejecting me, effectively telling me they don't have time for new friends like Matthew Broderick in Cable Guy. I find "Dunbar's number" to be quite accurate for me. He claims 147.8 people to be the mean for a socially stable group of people. My friends list on Facebook consists of 151 people. Looks like my anti-social habits have finally placed me in the norm for something.
The Internet has made it possible for niche groups to come together and accomplish a common goal. The crowdfunding site Kickstarter helps to showcase just how collaborative people can be. People can actually fund projects they want to take part in, assuming an active role in the creation of something they want. If you and your on-line community raise enough money to fund a movie version of your script for Showgirls 2, I guess dreams do come true.
Gofundme.com is another crowdfunding site that allows users to contribute to specific causes. Recently, in my district, a middle-school teacher lost her home due to a fire. This particular teacher housed rescue cats. Because of the fire, it was determined that she had upwards of fifty cats under her care (yikes!). A gofundme page was started, not to help the teacher recover from the fire, but to provide supplies for the cats who have now been twice displaced.
I was an avid player of World of Warcraft, a game that Rheingold refers to frequently. Oddly enough, I was never interested in the social aspect of it, which is one of the key features that sets it apart from most other games. When it came time to rely on other players for a group challenge, I either did so grudgingly, or I skipped it altogether. And the same goes for Xbox Live. The system comes with a headset which enables the player to communicate with others, but I rarely use them. One of the reasons for this is the community I encounter on games such as Call of Duty are rarely as kind or forgiving as the members of Rheingold's online community. (You wouldn't believe the number of prepubescent boys who have had sexual encounters with my mother.)
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www.siliconbeat.com
Other communities are extremely helpful. There is a subreddit on reddit.com in which the users try to explain difficult concepts to another user who has posed a specific question. ELI5's (Explain Like I'm 5) comment sections are almost always filled with reasonably accessible explanations to questions like: "How do we know that Earth's closest galaxy is 2.5 million lightyears away?" Each additional user who comments lends more to the discussion or clarifies certain elements of the answer that were confusing.
The Internet has enabled us to communicate people with common interests from all over the globe. In looking at the reports for my last blog, I noticed people from Mexico and Germany accessed it. While I haven't collaborated on anything with them, it's still pretty amazing to think that something I wrote was seen by someone half a world away.
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