ABSTRACT
In his bestselling business book of 2004, New Yorker magazine columnist, James Surowiecki, begins by taking the reader to an English country fair at the turn of the twentieth century. e scientist Francis Galton is wandering around the stalls and comes across a weight-judging competition, in which members of the public are waging sixpenny bets on guessing the weight of an enormous ox. Since large numbers of people had entered the competition it pricked Galton’s curiosity as he had long held an interest in the intellectual capabilities of the average person. His agenda was dark, at least by modern sensibilities, since he was keen to scientically prove that the average person was capable of very little and was, frankly, quite stupid. Aer the competition was over and the prizes awarded, Galton borrowed the tickets from the organisers and ran a series of statistical tests on them. Expecting the average guess to be wildly o the mark, he was surprised to discover that it was, in fact, correct to within one pound. Although disappointing from the point of view of Galton’s scientic agenda, the results enabled him to
write a paper for the science journal Nature.* Surowiecki argues that the implications of what Galton found that day have yet to be fully understood. He calls the eect, and his book, the Wisdom of Crowds and it has been very inuential on Web 2.0-style thinking, with several writers adapting Surowiecki’s ideas to t their observations on Web and Internet-based activities.
