I go to town when I write lecture notes for networked media. Without them, I would hardly be able to comprehend what Michael is saying. They keep me focused. The following notes regard the subjects of…

Multiplicity:

Multiplicity, the anecdote that Michael used was the one of Francis Galton. In 1906 Mr Galton attended a fair, where he discovered that the average of all the guesses of the weight of a cow was closer to the cow’s actual weight than the closest individual guess. This is of course, dear friends, is the power of multiplicity, where the power of the mass outweighs the power of the individual.

Now multiplicity does not only pertain to the notion of power (power = capability to achieve) but also variety- a different way of looking at things, or a broader perspective.

Within multiplicity there exist two subsections: people and machine multiplicity. Machine multiplicity involves scale and algorithm while people multiplicity involves crowd sourcing and the concept of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’.
The wisdom of the crowd, examples including Wikipedia and open source software, has its advantages in four key areas:

Diversity of opinion, independence of opinion (little influenced), decentralization (interpretation of information is likely their own interpretation) and aggregation.

The power of the people is important because people can do things that computers cannot, or can do things with computers that computers cannot do on their own.

(to be continued...
I'm fighting illness whilst sitting here.)