This paper examines crowdsourcing as a technological phenomenon that harnesses the collective power of distributed groups to accomplish large-scale tasks. The essay explores the advantages of crowdsourced work, including the ability to process enormous amounts of data and complete projects that would take individuals years to finish alone. Through case studies—including MIT's connectome mapping project and Reddit's response to the Boston Marathon Bombing—the paper demonstrates crowdsourcing's real-world applications in neuroscience and criminal investigation. The paper also identifies a critical limitation: quality control. While crowds offer unprecedented processing power and creative potential, their output requires careful filtering and guidance to be truly effective.
One of the more interesting phenomena offered by the latest advancements in technology is the ability for ubiquitous communication and crowdsourcing of different objectives. Some organizations are using crowds to create creative content for commercials, while others are using crowds to solve crimes and even understand mysteries related to the functioning of the human brain. Many people have identified the power inherent in crowds and have been giving users the ability to create content and offer opinions in new and exciting ways.
Crowds have many advantages over the work of an individual or a small team. For example, a crowd can work together to complete a task that would take any one individual many years to complete. However, when the work is divided up among many contributors, each individual contribution can aggregate into an enormous amount of processing power. For instance, it has been estimated that each day people around the world spend 600 years collectively playing Angry Birds, and this collective effort could potentially be redirected toward more rewarding work.
This principle of distributed effort demonstrates how collective intelligence can dramatically accelerate problem-solving and data processing at scales that would be economically or practically impossible for traditional teams to manage.
Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is attempting to harness the power of crowds to build a "connectome"—a map of the vast number of connections in the brain that underlie vision, memory, and disease (Johnson, 2012). His team has created a game that lets players help map the brain by filling in colors that help create a map of neural processes. The work of users helps create a data map of different slices of brain images taken with an electron microscope.
It has been estimated that even with a computer program, it could take one individual a thousand years to complete this work. By distributing the task across thousands of casual players, Seung's team has made this monumental scientific undertaking tractable. This application demonstrates how crowdsourcing can unlock new possibilities in neuroscience research and expand the frontiers of human knowledge about brain connectivity.
There have been other uses of crowds to process data that have also been highlighted in the press. After the Boston Marathon Bombing, the FBI utilized the power of crowds to help them dissect the massive amount of work that lay before them. "There has to be hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs, videos, and other observations that were made down at that finish line yesterday," Timothy Alben, superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police, said at a press conference (Powers, 2013). Users built websites that allowed them to collaborate and help law officials sift through digital data.
Reddit's "Find Boston Bombers" forum accumulated more than 1,700 users who highlighted suspicious persons and objects through collected photographs and videos. On Imgur.com, dozens uploaded snapshots of the crowd near the finish line. Users added annotations to report what they considered to be potentially suspicious persons or images. This grassroots investigative effort showed how online communities could mobilize rapidly in response to urgent real-world events (Powers, 2013).
However, one of the inherent problems is that users could potentially target their attention on individuals who are not actually suspicious, creating the risk of false leads and unwarranted scrutiny of innocent people.
"Filtering and guidance remain essential to effectiveness"
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