Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

      As an example of this, consider what happened next to Ory Okolloh.²⁰ During the upheaval after the rigged Kenyan election of 2007, she began tracking incidents of government violence. People called and e-mailed her tips, and she posted as many as she could. She wished she had a tool to do this automatically—to let anyone post an incident to a shared map. So she wrote about that:

      Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something—any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?

      One of the people who saw Okolloh’s post was Erik Hersman, a friend and Web site developer who’d been raised in Kenya and lived in Nairobi. The instant Hersman read it, he realized he knew someone who could make the idea a reality. He called his friend David Kobia, a Kenyan programmer who was working in Birmingham, Alabama. Much like Okolloh, Kobia was interested in connecting Kenyans to talk about the country’s crisis, and he had created a discussion site devoted to it. Alas, it had descended into political toxicity and calls for violence, so he’d shut it down, depressed by having created a vehicle for hate speech. He was driving out of town to visit some friends when he got a call from Hersman. Hersman explained Okolloh’s idea—a map-based tool for reporting violence—and Kobia immediately knew how to make it happen. He and Hersman contacted Okolloh, Kobia began frantically coding with them, and within a few days they were done. The tool allowed anyone to pick a location on a Google Map of Kenya, note the time an incident occurred, and describe what happened. They called it Ushahidi—the Swahili word for “testimony.”

      Within days, Kenyans had input thousands of incidents of electoral violence. Soon after, Ushahidi attracted two hundred thousand dollars in nonprofit funds and the trio began refining it to accept reports via everything from SMS to Twitter. Within a few years, Ushahidi had become an indispensable tool worldwide, with governments and nonprofits relying on it to help determine where to send assistance. After a massive earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, a Ushahidi map, set up within hours, cataloged twenty-five thousand text messages and more than four million tweets over the next month. It has become what Ethan Zuckerman, head of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, calls “one of the most globally significant technology projects.”

      The birth of Ushahidi is a perfect example of the power of public thinking and multiples. Okolloh could have simply wandered around wishing such a tool existed. Kobia could have wandered around wishing he could use his skills to help Kenya. But because Okolloh was thinking out loud, and because she had an audience of like-minded people, serendipity happened.

      The tricky part of public thinking is that it works best in situations where people aren’t worried about “owning” ideas. The existence of multiples—the knowledge that people out there are puzzling over the same things you are—is enormously exciting if you’re trying to solve a problem or come to an epiphany. But if you’re trying to make money? Then multiples can be a real problem. Because in that case you’re trying to stake a claim to ownership, to being the first to think of something. Learning that other people have the same idea can be anything from annoying to terrifying.

      Scientists themselves are hardly immune. Because they want the fame of discovery, once they learn someone else is working on a similar problem, they’re as liable to compete as to collaborate—and they’ll bicker for decades over who gets credit. The story of penicillin illustrates this as well. Three decades after Duchesne made his discovery of pencillin, Alexander Fleming in 1928²¹ stumbled on it again, when some mold accidentally fell into a petri dish and killed off the bacteria within. But Fleming didn’t seem to believe his discovery could be turned into a lifesaving medicine, so, remarkably, he never did any animal experiments and soon after dropped his research entirely. Ten years later, a pair of scientists in Britain—Ernest Chain and Howard Florey—read about Fleming’s work, intuited that penicillin could be turned into a medicine, and quickly created an injectable drug that cured infected mice. After the duo published their work, Fleming panicked: someone else might get credit for his discovery! He hightailed it over to Chain and Florey’s lab, greeting them with a wonderfully undercutting remark: “I have come to see what you’ve been doing with my old penicillin.” The two teams eventually worked together, transforming penicillin into a mass-produced drug that saved countless lives in World War II. But for years, even after they all received a Nobel Prize, they jousted gently over who ought to get credit.

      The business world is even more troubled by multiples. It’s no wonder; if you’re trying to make some money, it’s hardly comforting to reflect on the fact that there are hundreds of others out there with precisely the same concept. Patents were designed to prevent someone else from blatantly infringing on your idea, but they also function as a response to another curious phenomenon: unintentional duplication. Handing a patent on an invention to one person creates artificial scarcity. It is a crude device, and patent offices have been horribly abused in recent years by “patent trolls”; they’re people who get a patent for something (either by conceiving the idea themselves, or buying it) without any intention of actually producing the invention—it’s purely so they can sue, or soak, people who go to market with the same concept. Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage.

      I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who tell me they’d like to talk openly online about what they’re working on. They want to harness multiples. But they’re worried that someone will take their idea and execute it more quickly than they can. “I know I’d get better feedback on my project if I wrote and tweeted about it,” one once told me, “but I can’t risk it.” This isn’t universally true; some start-up CEOs have begun trying to be more open, on the assumption that, as Bill Joy is famously reported quipping, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”²² They know that talking about a problem makes it more likely you’ll hook up with someone who has an answer.

      But on balance, the commercial imperative to “own” an idea explains why public thinking has been a boon primarily for everyday people (or academics or nonprofits) pursuing their amateur passions. If you’re worried about making a profit, multiples dilute your special position in the market; they’re depressing. But if you’re just trying to improve your thinking, multiples are exciting and catalytic. Everyday thinkers online are thrilled to discover someone else with the same idea as them.

      We can see this in the history of “giving credit” in social media.²³ Every time a new medium for public thinking has emerged, early users set about devising cordial, Emily Post–esque protocols. The first bloggers in the late 1990s duly linked back to the sources where they’d gotten their fodder. They did it so assiduously that the creators of blogging software quickly created an automatic “trackback” tool to help automate the process. The same thing happened on Twitter. Early users wanted to hold conversations, so they began using the @ reply to indicate they were replying to someone—and then to credit the original user when retweeting a link or pithy remark. Soon the hashtag came along—like #stupidestthingivedone today or #superbowl—to create floating, ad hoc conversations. All these innovations proved so popular that Twitter made them a formal element of its service. We so value conversation and giving credit that we hack it into any system that comes along.

      Stanford University English professor Andrea Lunsford is one of America’s leading researchers into how young people write. If you’re worried that college students today СКАЧАТЬ