Invasion of the Web Amateurs
Interesting article by Steven Levy in Newsweek. Is the crowd stupid or wise? Sometimes it’s stupid, but more and more–driven by the Internet–it’s wiser than the wisest expert.
March 26, 2007 issue - Andrew Keen is not surprised at the latest twist in the ongoing saga of Wikipedia. In his view, the entire Internet movement involving “collective intelligence,” “citizen journalism” and “the wisdom of crowds” is a cultural meltdown, an instance of barbarians at civilization’s gates. He considers Wikipedia, the popular Internet-based encyclopedia written and vetted by anyone who cares to contribute, as no more reliable than the output of a million monkeys banging away at their typewriters, and says as much in his upcoming poison-pen letter to Web 2.0, “The Cult of the Amateur” (due from Currency/Doubleday in June).
bob (blog author) says:
Added on March 30th, 2007 at 2:37 pmStupid or wise (and its probably more than a bit of both) the crowd is here and it isn’t going home anytime soon. Wikipedia may or may not be the product of monkeys, but it is a place that marketers need to monitor regularly to see what the monkeys are saying about their clients/themselves.
I work in college and university marketing and Wikipedia entries are often a much better place for potential students to find simple things like the academic majors offered than hunting around on the official college website. Sometimes the monkeys indeed can do it better than the folks with a Ph.D. Are we surprised?
I hope Andrew’s article does come along by June… that’s still time for me to include his views in a July keynote on “Trends and Tribulations” in the future of online communications.