I’ve been reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, a series of stories regarding decision making. Surowiecki surveys the auto industry, science, TV, and other areas of interest, noting how diverse views within groups can often lead to better (or more profound) decision making than individuals working on their own. These stories - and they are just that, narratives of decisions - conflict with many of our cultural narratives of decision making (the loner) or even pedagogical beliefs (collaboration). They conflict because they often complicate what it means to decide as an individual or to decide in union with others.

And, as I often do, I find parallels with academic decision making - a process that tries to triumph the collaborative (committee work, peer review, the in class assignment) but still tends to emphasize the individual or outstanding figure (especially his/her role in each of these so called collaborative moments). One area that this emphasis takes place is writing, and regarding technology, writing online. Weblogs have made that point even more explicit. Besides the neurosis regarding writing to public spaces, and besides the typical hand ringing academics often perform when faced with communicative innovations, the real wisdom of crowds thing occurs when we don’t even recognize the online writing in the first place. Without realizing that there is a wisdom of crowds, decision making often is wrong, out of date, uninformed, or uninspired.

So? So, a good part of decision making comes from negotiating information, and that, too, is a point Surowiecki makes. Weblogs foreground a considerable amount of thought by placing ideas in public areas for linking, reading, commenting, and interaction. Despite the increasing number of academics who blog or read blogs, we still don’t see a significant number of faculty moving some of their attention to online spaces - either as readers or as writers. I could do a survey of my department, for instance, and I would discover that few, if any, engage with ideas through the weblog; they prefer the individual article or the individual book. The dispersal of information across sites - as my or any other person’s blogroll testifies - is still not on the radar.

While I don’t find the wisdom of crowds to be a universal practice, I can see its value in certain practices. If we see a collection of weblogs (like an academic blogroll) as a crowd, then we might begin to consider how its own wisdom might inform practice. I can only speak about various ideas or events I’ve witnessed recently, and I wonder how better we would have been had we used a logic that resembled the one Surowiecki discusses. I don’t know if our problems would have been solved, but we would have reached far different conclusions, and possibly we would have reached conclusions that would have allowed for further growth and informed decision making. That logic might have been reflected in the thing we call “weblogs” or in the idea of the weblog, a virtual relational space where linking, reading, commenting, and interaction occur.