The Unwisdom of Crowds, Introduction

This article is part of the meta-post Racism Rampant or how Jamie won Big Brother Australia. This article covers the unwisdom of crowds and the mob mentality. It is the first in a series of articles.

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After reading Marc Fawzi’s articles on the wisdom of crowds, I was confronted with the unwisdom of crowds, which is actually the mob mentality. It has been proven that the more people are together, the less intelligent decisions will be taken because of mob mentality.

How does this translate to the memediggers and the blogosphere? It is a fact that mob mentality is somewhat diffused since people are normally only congregating in virtual meeting places. So in effect, the mob mentality might not be as strong. Yet it is still fickle and the phenomenon of getting “dugg” is quite a testament to that fact.

 

It has been shown that stories stay popular at the most for 36 hours in the blogosphere. It’s almost like an antigen system, an immune system of the blogosphere comes and culls or wipes out the viral contents of some stories. Or is it more akin to a brushfire burning itself out, loosing its intensity?

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