Skepticism: An Integral Part of Collective Intelligence

In his book, "Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide," Henry Jenkins discusses how collective intelligence has manifested itself with regard to the television program Survivor. He explains the workings of a community of "spoilers," intensely avid fans who work cooperatively to try and discover facts of the show. Jenkins examines the case of a controversial spoiler and how the activities of spoilers raise an array of philosophical implications. The issue that piques my interest the most is the necessary skepticism that goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence.

From the start, Jenkins sheds light on the underlying thread of skepticism that characterizes the spoilers. He describes how ChillOne – the aforementioned user who caused an upset among hardcore online Survivor fans – posted "information on the Internet and lived through months of intense grilling by the spoiling community to defend his reputation" (26). The onslaught began with ChillOne's rather bold initial post of claims, eliciting questions of his credibility in a mere three minutes. One longtime spoiler expresses the almost blanket rule of distrust for new participants, explaining that "[y]ou don't trust first time people. You have to wonder why NOW of all the times they could have posted... once that person is found to be lying, they are never trusted again and they are pretty much blacklisted" (35). I find this blatantly paradoxical: the success of the spoiler community relies on gathering information from different users, but the community is suspicious of new intelligence and relies on a reserve of dependable veterans. Over time, ChillOne managed to gain more credibility but against great resistance. Clearly, the theoretical underpinnings of collective intelligence as a democratic model for knowledge can fail to hold true in reality.

Jenkins continues to detail the extent of cynicism among spoilers. He recounts how a gambling operation in Las Vegas dropped betting on Survivor results because a few CBS employees were placing bets allegedly based on insider information. Their bets coincided with ChillOne's assertions, supporting the validity of his claims. The same factual token, however, can also be used against ChillOne. Jenkins notes that some people recognized that those CBS employees could have based their bets not on insider tips but ChillOne himself, which would do nothing to prove or discredit his leads. This would not be the first time someone exploited the vast resources and deep devotion of the online spoiling community. As Jenkins tells, "[i]t had happened before when the [spoilers] had trusted some consistently accurate predictions from a Boston newspaper backing up their inside information on Survivor: The Australian Outback until it was clear that the reporter was just writing his column based on stuff he learned from the online discussions" (45). Albeit a powerful sign of a participatory culture, this flawed, recursive flow of information between consumers and producers forces communities like the spoilers to interpret everything with a fistful, rather than a grain, of salt, from groundless lies to legitimately reliable truths.

Wikipedia constitutes another example of doubt underscoring a system of collective intelligence. Just as Pierre Lévy argues, Wikipedia represents "the sum total of information held individually by the members of [a] group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Anyone – from a brain surgeon with ten years of real-world experience to a freshman high school student in their first biology class – can contribute. The problem is clear: this creates a more democratic catalogue of information but at the cost of validity. My concern is over discretion; where do we draw the line for skepticism? Personally, I have become so pessimistic about finding truth from any outlet to the point of frustration. I think the more we mature as an information society, the more people will be bombarded with information from a multitude of sources, both credible and not. In order for future systems of collective intelligence to be even more useful, society needs a tailored amount of suspicion.