Polaris

Collective Intelligence

Part 1. The hidden Potential of Collective Intelligence

                                                                             2425 이수민

Nowadays, the general public makes new information and they are affecting the currents in our society hugely. They not only produce information but also solve the problems that experts failed. The individuals think, and take action based on it, and that leads to the development of the whole corporations. This is what general publics do. They make new values, make changes in our living. We call it 'Collective intelligence'.

Internet is a hot place where a lot of people participate. Various people meet in there, communicate directly or indirectly through media or other things. The majority doing Internet also enabled the Internet to be a huge storage of information. And that made the information in the Internet be more revised, corrected, and some people even put additional information on them. Lots of people look on the Internet while surfing from time to time. This is what the general publics do and this is the result of Collective intelligence. Let me show other examples of collective Intelligence which shows its great potential.

When a lot of people are assembled, they show their power very significantly. They often excel the experts in a specific field. Why? The experts are specialized in their major only. They have lots of knowledge, but those knowledges are not applied to wide area. However, the collective intelligence can overcome those limits. The public who has various knowledges from various fields produce new information storages and enable them to be applied to wide area, and they can be even more widespread to general folks than the knowledges from the experts. Sometimes the collective intelligence combine many different knowledges and make new one by associating them. By these situations, the experts cannot win the collective intelligence.

One example of collective intelligence change the whole world. In January, 2010, there happened an earthquake in Haiti, resulting in 2.5million deaths and 10million sufferers. Lots of aid organizations came out for help, but they couldn't do aid activities effectively because the disaster was so big that it changed the features of the whole country. In a chaos, there was one thing which saved them. It was a map called 'Ushahidi' made by lots of people online. 'Ushahidi', unlike to other maps, was a map which can be edited by any people on Internet. The volunteerers who found victims including sufferers started to indicate the places and materials they need on 'Ushahidi‘. And this became a huge help for the international aid organizations. As you can see, the more various people participate, the more synergy comes out. The collective intelligence makes substantial knowledges which can be hardly found in a specialized books or in dictionaries.

Now it's your turn to think about it. Don't you google or search on Naver services when you need informations?