The Tradeoff

Michael has spoken about a trade off that comes from this mass connectivity that exists in the world. The price of Metcalfe's law, so to speak. As an example he spoke about cutting out the middlemen, disintermediation. The newspapers lose money because they no longer are the place to go to sell your junk. We've got ebay now for that. But then the newspapers can't afford to employ journalists and we're deprived of quality journalism.
I very strongly disagree with this line of thought, and believe that the tradeoff occurs far away from the pros and cons of the death of old Media. For one this, Old Media is losing for a reason. There is next to nothing New Media can't do that Old Media can. Quality journalism comes from quality journalists, not from newspapers. If the newspapers won't employ them then the internet will be their new best friend. Blogs, as has been pointed out in lectures, can be seen as a journalism. Sell advertising space on your blog and if you're good enough you're getting paid again. If Twitter wants to make money, they should have people pay to subscribe to quality journalist news feeds, after all its not only about reporting the truth but reporting it the fastest. What we lose in the newspapers, the Internet gives back in abundance. And saves trees.

So where do I think the tradeoff happens? Well after today's (wait, time check... yesterday's) lecture I had a thought... Global citizens are fucking stupid.
This Networked Media Class might be able to guess Michael's weight using the power of averages, but big fucking deal. Crowds aren't wise. There is some lovely maths that means educated guesses are excellent things to group and draw graphs from and can help in lots of lovely ways. Key Word here; EDUCATED! In terms of chance, it doesn't work that way. That magician who claims to have used a group of people to predict the lottery numbers (he was on sunrise, so was the guy who proved he was a fraud. It was a simple technological trick using some camera magic, not crowd psychicness) So people in large groups are not smart, unless they are all educated a little on the subject at hand.
So here is is. The Tradeoff. Collective Intelligence gives us YouTube, wikipedia and other wonderful things which i adore and wish i could go back in time and invent.
And it gives us people who will buy tulips for ridiculous amounts of money. It gives us the collective intelligence mob mentality that will drive the price of stock to ridiculous lows just because one person has lots of shares. It robs us of real world material in many ways. The GFC GEC Sub prime mortgage whatever left a lot of people in a very bad situation. That poor dutch schmuck who sold all his land for a fucking flower is another example. It makes the value of things wrong. Good and services should be simple, supply and demand should be simple. i.e Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be valuable. Just because something is rare and useful, doesn't mean it should be valuable. Bu when something is rare, useful, and everybody wants one, it should be valuable.


Collective intelligence warps value to the point of idiocy. And gives such a pool of human thought that there is nothing we can't achieve.

Its almost paradoxical, but i think its a fair tradeoff.