Some Background to Collective Intelligence...

Collective Intelligence is a phenomenon bred by new media. The term alone produces 1.27 million results on Google. Collective intelligence is... groupthink, collaboration, crowd sourcing, community knowledge, wisdom of the crowds, consensus decision making, just to name a few of the trendy media theory terms thrown around. But to define collective intelligence it is fitting that we use Wikipedia, itself an example of the phenomenon. At its most basic: “Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals”.

Now let’s take a quick scan through history to help narrow down our own definition...

Stopping on 1912 and the father of sociology Emile Durkheim we get the first articulations of collective intelligence. Durkheim identified society as the place where wisdom lies, rather than elites which is a crucial power shift. But his concept, called ‘collective consciousness’ is more interested in how individuals all contribute their own ideas to create common ideas which tie a group of people together. The important thing to note is that differing from Durkheim’s theory, collective intelligence doesn’t treat society as some super-organism with the same ideas. Instead the emphasis is on independent individuals and their diversity of thoughts, opinions, ideas. This is what makes up the type of ‘intelligence’ we are focused on.

Next we come to French media scholar and philosopher Pierre Lévy who introduced the concept of collective intelligence as we know it in his 1994 book. Here is a quote from his book ‘L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace’.

“What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… My initial premise is based on the notion of a universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity… New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge”.

These musings by the Frenchman contain an important point, the cornerstone to our definition of collective intelligence: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something.” Opening up the opportunity to contribute and create to everyone means a wider knowledge pool and in theory, better knowledge. Lévy also hints to something which is very important in the next phase of our definition: “new communications systems”, which are essentially online, internet-based ways of enabling us to share our intelligence with each other. He refers to a “knowledge space” which emerges as a kind of melting pot for all the intelligence, which is largely online.

Fast forward a few decades and we get American media theorist Henry Jenkins’ updated idea on collective intelligence. Jenkins’ emphasis is on a ‘participatory culture’ and ‘interactivity’ as the building blocks of collective intelligence. It is all about using the ‘We’ in Web. It is about rejecting the idea that the media transmits things to us as passive consumers, instead we, the ordinary people, are active creators and producers of content.

So, collective intelligence uses a wide variety of ideas from the active contributions of ordinary people in society to create something better than if it were made by only a select few.