Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

This video had both brief speeches and a panel discussion about the topics of collaboration and collective intelligence. There were three people speaking in this video and one moderator. One was a cultural anthropologist who studies media usage of young people in America and Japan. Another was worker at Linden Lab, known for its creation of an online 3D virtual reality collaboration tool called "2nd Life”. Last was professor at the University of New York at Buffalo and creator of the Institute of Distributed Creativity. The overall discussion evolved around defining collective intelligence as being a group of people forming together to make decisions. Collective Intelligence is a group of individuals acting collectively in ways that advance intelligence. The the group on the video was looking at how collective intelligence is affected by information technology, and the internet. Apparently intelligence collective and collaborating is so attractive that there is a Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. The center is looking at how computers and humans act collectively to generate more intelligence. Collective intelligence is described in the video as being a group of people forming together to make decisions.  This collaboration between our kinds is assumed to have been existent in some form or another as long as humans have inhabited the earth.  However the video focuses mainly on the role that information technology has played in allowing collective intelligence to be fully harnessed and possibly abused.  To harness collective intelligence, it requires successfully connecting the right people with computers. There were lots of things talked about in this video but a few of the comments kind of stood out or stuck with me more than others. One comment that stuck out to me was that corporations are able to monopolize through social networking websites. With websites such as facebook this can happen very easily. Social networking has a lot of personal info in it so they can see your likes and dislikes but it also helps keep people linked together. Another topic they talked about was amateur expert collision. This is the idea that because of the massive advancement in technology like the internet, people that were once considered amateurs are now starting to populate the same arenas where professionals once dominated. The creation of collective intelligence would have never been possible to create without information technology. 60 percent of the web is created by users. So we work for free by using the internet and blogging about topics or exchanging knowledge on the net.