Cult of Amateurs vs Wisdom of Crowds....

...was the title of last night's London Social Media network meetup hosted ably by Lloyd Davis and Richard Stacy

Its a very timely question - in essence the Andrew Keen "cult of amateurs" view is that (to quote the man)

There are all sorts of parallels between the contemporary history of media and fashion. Both are seducing all of us. Wearing Hermes makes us feel exclusive; authoring a blog makes us feel powerful. But the consequence of each is the stripping away of quality. As Dana Thomas argues:

“The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special. Luxury has lost its luster.”

Replace "luxury" with "truth" and you've could be describing the blogosphere:

In order to make truth ‘accessible,’ the Internet has stripped away all that has made it special. Truth has lost its luster.

Conversely, the "Wisdom of Crowds view" is that, given sufficient heterogeneity, a clear enough point of discussion, and independent decision making then a large number of individual agents will make individual decisions, the mean of which is highly accurate.

After a short paper from Richard outlining the basic thesis and conditions of both sides of the argument, the discussion started off with some fairly topical issues such as whether the MSM or the Blogosphere had called some big current stories better - the Northern Rock one, and a few other current stories too - and thus the scene was set for what promised to be a lively evening.

It also started off as quite interesting in that the bloggers in the ensemble didn't really recognise MSM's view of the blogosphere, and the Journos didn't recognise the blogosphere's view of the MSM. Stereotypes eh...

We broke into 3 subgroups, looking at:

Media vs Medium - will social media really subvert msm, or is the Keensian world just the bleating of a group who until recently were gatekeepers to a restricted asset?

(An observation here: those 3 preconditions for crowd wisdom - heterogeneity, clear point of discussion, and independent decision making - are pretty useful criteria for thinking about MSM as well here. How heterogenous are the contributors, what is the spin tendency, how independent are they? If no better than the blogospheroids its hard to understand that there can be any value add - in other words, for the MSM to be "better than" the blogosphere it probably, strategically, needs to have a "flight for quality" all of its own* )

Does Size matter - the impact of size of crowd on its "wisdom"

(An observation here too - as well as size, network theory has a lot to say about the type of network design and the amount of "noise" it generates. Highly interlinked networks generate a lot of noise, more hierarchical ones far less. Of course with hierarchy comes less signal as well)

Quality - how do you find quality material and qualified sources in the new media.

I went for the Quality group as the other 2 areas are fairly familiar terrain whereas my instinct tells me that this is where the game will be won or lost - lots of very interesting questions raised, my big takeaways were:

(i) Defining a way of getting "trusted authority" on a subject in social media is very necessary - but non trivial! People with big reputations in one area can fairly easily push into areas in which they are far less competent, any rating system can be gamed, aggregating the views of the "silent majority" of long tailed small voices is harder than tuning into a few big voices.

(ii) Defining how that trusted authority would be used in working out a "wisdom of crowds" scenario is also non trivial - there was an interesting view that we may have to have trusted "channels" so you know what you are getting. And it turns out that traditional authority markers are not always right - insights often come from outsiders, insiders are frequently in-bred in terms of ideas.

(iii) To think that the blogosphere is immune to the ills of MSM - influence, spin etc etc - is touchingly naive - if anything the disproportionate impact of "A listers" and their huge fanboy networks can push fairly unrepresentative views quite far.

(iv) The blogosphere is not a few channels, its tens of thousands, with quite large lumps of extremes on any one topic, so discerning the "wisdom of crowds" in all that data is very hard. (very true - its one of the applications of the Memetic Difference Engine we built for the BBC Innovations Lab)

It was also good to meet bloggers whose blogs I have read before, and some of whom I hadn't.

Thanks also to Ian Fenn for explaining the evolution of the New York Chinese dish General Tso's chicken. Ian's site is actually typical of that blogosphere gem, the "pro" amateur authority who is passionate about their interest and does it for love.

In short, if the blogosphere can find a way to find sites like Ian's, and keep them bobbing above the sea of PR, spin, SEO gaming, link farming etc then it will win. If not.....then its just a rush to the lowest common denominators......

(*By the way, I don't know if anyone watched the continuation of Question Time on News 24 blast night - interesting hybrid, asking another panel the far tougher questions the blogosphere asks as standard.)