2009.122: CrowdSourcing vs CrowdLynching
I love the idea of crowdsourcing and always have. We practiced it in the
1970's as ham radio operators. We had "repeaters" and if someone needed
advice or equipment or an introduction, they'd give a yell out on the
repeater and often someone would come back with help. Note in passing
that a repeater in 1975 was very much like a social network. You could
gather there *live*, audio only, and chat, potentially "get lucky" with
one of the very few female ops, network for business, make sales, party,
get invites, try new stuff, etc.
Amazon Mechanical Turk ( http://mturk.com ) is a crowsourcing tool that
has existed for a few years. I've heard of it but hadn't used it before
a few weeks ago. Since then I've done a few jobs on it (called HITs,
human intelligence tasks) to see what the workers see and feel. I have
also commissioned a few jobs like podcast transcriptions and I'm happy
with the results and the cost.
Yesterday I chatted with Jason Huff who has created Mechanical Turk
Diaries Project ( http://mechanicalturkdiaries.com ). Jason's project
takes the stories, told by the workers themselves in around 500 words
and publishes them in a Tumblr mini blog. Reading the stories, you may
understand why I see a greater depth in AMT than just a labor exchange.
There are stories about people in cancer treatment or unemployed who use
AMT as a way to remain human and active during an otherwise crushing
period in their lives. Others earn money to travel to distant weddings
of family members.
I have attached an mp3 to this to see what posterous does with it. If
that doesn't work or if you'd care to follow my progress with Turkers
Talk, go to http://tr.im/amtchat for more info on the Talkshoe site.
What I do not care for is crowd opinions imposed as the last word. I
expressed my opinion about the recent Murphy-Goode #areallygoodejob
campaign in the New Wine Consumer but it represents only a small part of
my feelings. What I see is that the illusion of crowd wisdom can
be taken too far. The opinion of the crowd is not an absolute value.
What if I disagree? Do I have the right to be a contrarian? I never
understood why I should look at Digg to get the news. I'd rather look at
numerous feeds, including Digg and make up my own mind. It must be an
age thing, or a musician thing. I don't see blindly following people in
their every opinion, regardless of how strong I trust them (Chris
Brogan) or admire them (Leo Laporte) or even adulate their intellectual
abilities (Merlin Mann). All these people are huge heroes of mine, but I
often disagree with what they say. I just hope you do too, or we're in
for a world where everyone marches to the same beat and that's something
I'll never be happy with.
