Week 1

So far the ESociety course has been interesting.  I’ve been particularly interested in the concepts surrounding collaboration and the power of groups, particularly with regards to collective intelligence and the dangers of groupthink overcoming individuality.

Collaboration is defined as working together towards a common goal, but strong collaboration has some prerequisites.  It needs to be intentional, if you cite someone else’s work and they never even knew you existed, that’s citation not collaboration.  It needs to be towards a specific goal, you need to collaborate on something after all.  And it needs to have some significant scale.  The greater the scope of the project, the stronger the collaboration needs to be.

The other interesting concept from this course has been group power and its potential and dangers.  For example a large group of people would be able to more accurately guess the number of jelly beans in a jar.  Whereas an individual person would have trouble with the idea, a large crowd would be able to guess the weight to within 5% or 10% according to studies on collective intelligence.  However there are dangers associated with this power, people tend to get trapped by collective thinking when they let it overwhelm their individual thoughts.  The analogy of note here is a group of army ants that get so trapped following their own scent trails that they get stuck in a circle and die there.   This has associations with the psychological concepts of group think and social pressure.  Finally the power of a group has the ability to amplify the existing prejudices and biases of the group’s members and reinforce them.