Chapter 11: James Surowiecki’s book mentioned in this chapter outlines four elements to create a so-called “wise crowd,” one that can make decisions better than experts. These include “diversity of opinion” and “independence.” Since social groups online seem to form crowds of many like-minded people, what caution would you give someone using information they find from a socialized website or resource?
Answer: When a social group online forms a crowd of many like-minded people, this breeds a problem that can cause incredibility of information and the spreading of often incorrect and biased information. A group of like-minded people will be biased towards one direction of a situation and may not give you the factual response that you desire. These groups of people can also experience groupthink. That is, if you search for information on a discussion board of a social learning or social website in general, the information may look as if it is agreed upon and appears to be absolutely valid when it really is just a group of people agreeing with each other without the desire to break from the norm opinion. The bottom line is that when you are searching for information and especially information that is debatable, you want the ability to see the situation from different viewpoints and perspectives in order to ultimately asses in your own mind the correct answer based on different points of info. When you pull information from a website that consists of all like-minded individuals, you do not have the ability to receive the information from different types of viewpoints and you therefore can not trust it. It can be too biased and therefore mislead you from the truth.
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Your job as a netizen then is to determine a personal level of trust depending, in part, on your belief about the diversity of opinion you encounter. A Facebook group opinion may be less valuable than the ratings of a product on Amazon.com. Maybe...
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