ia play

Steven Johnson has been writing about literacy scares in Dawn of the digital natives, inspired (or incensed?) by the recent National Endowment for the Arts study.

He seems especially irritated by their insistence on considering reading to be something that only happens when you have paper in front of you. He highlights this quote from the report:

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

I realised the other day I’ve never actually read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and that was undermining my ability to spot when senior management were systematically misusing the concept. So I got a copy from Swapshop - these are really not the sort of books you should ever have to spend money on.

I’ve been slightly resistent to reading it. At university David Gauntlett introduced us to Charles Mackay’s the Madness of Crowds during lectures about moral hysteria about media (and Victorian moral outrage at the bicycle, if I remember rightly). ‘Madness’ is not the easiest of reads but the stuff on tulip mania makes your jaw drop at times. It may have been my rosy memories of those lectures that made me irritated at Surowiecki’s concept.

Now Surowiecki isn’t rejecting that groups of people sometimes (frequently?) do intensely stupid things. He is more interested in describing the conditions under which a crowd can be surprisingly smart. The book should really be called ‘When Crowds are Wise’.

I haven’t finished it yet and don’t really feel like it would matter if I don’t. ‘Wisdom’ and other pop theory books are more tightly written than ‘Madness’ but the structure is repetitive and they outstay their welcome pretty quickly. Tellingly, most are expansions of magazine articles, expanded (or padded) with a series of anecdotes and a smattering of scientific studies that are briefly skimmed over. They make me crave depth. But maybe not as much depth as Mackay gives you!

Pop theory books are such easy targets, I shouldn’t really expend energy on them. Just read ValleyWag instead.

In What is Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly describes Amazon reviews as harnessing collective intelligence of the users:

“Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results.”

We’ve found in our user research that our audience doesn’t expect to find reading or writing user reviews to beparticularly valuable. Important as the user research is, this doesn’t mean we won’t build the functionality (remember the faster horses).

Now I do pay attention to the reviews. Generally I’m not that interested in a Mrs J Laithwaite’s individual opinion of The Not So Big House but the fact that 9 out of the 10 reviewers gave the book 5* holds more weight.

But, just as in the real world, there are individuals whose opinions are more than enough, especially in a particular domain. Stephen A. Haines is the #9 reviewer on Amazon.co.uk and writes shed loads of reviews of popular science books. I can’t, however, subscribe to his reviews or do anything like sort his reviews to find all his 5* rated books.

Swapshop also restricts user-to-user relationships which seems misguided. Having swapped one book with eadaoin surely that increases the chance that I will find another book in their collection than in the general mass of books? It is pretty hard to even find the user pages, let alone subscribe to them. Your only hope is to hack the URL or stumble across one of their books.

LibraryThing, on the otherhand, is brilliant at this sort of stuff. Not only can you subscribe to anyone’s library and their reviews but LibraryThing actively suggests overlapping and similar libraries and provides ‘watch this library’ functionality.