The Power of the Blogosphere and Impact of Groupthink

The most prevalent lesson I’ve learned this week is how rapidly information is now disseminated and digested as a result of the continued adoption and use of social media.  If you look at the acceptance of Twitter over the last 3 years, it is only continuing to grow.  With 2 Million active users (defined as those who follow 8+ people) and growing, Twitter is only going to continue to spread the delivery and receipt of information to mass quantities of people.  When you combine a tool like Twitter with other social media tools such as Youtube or Vine, you really have the ability to make something to go viral, and sometimes for the negative.  This past week a Youtube video of Philadelphia Eagles’ Wide Receiver Riley Cooper was posted in which he uses a racial slur.  Within a few days of the posting, the video has gone viral and all major sports and news publications in the country have picked up on the story.  Cooper’s reputation, his relationship with his teammates, friends, and almost everyone he’s come across in his life has changed in practically the blink of an eye.  I’m not even going to begin to defend his actions because they are vile and offensive, but this entire situation displays how none of us are safe from having a bad moment public moment with the presence of 6.5 Billion mobile phones world-wide.  Someone is almost assured to be watching and recording and can change your life in an instant with a single post to the internet.  This situation, of course, spans far beyond us as individuals and is something that all companies must take into account.  When you think about how much damage has been done to the Philadelphia Eagles brand as a result of this incident, one can only expect that more and more organizations will be forced to train their employees on being sensitive to the existence of social media. 

This entire concept is further evidenced by James Surowiecki’s lecture on the power and danger of online crowds.  In his lecture Surowiecki discuss the impact of the 2005 Tsunami and poses three questions about the blogosphere:

1.  What does it tell us about our ideas about what motivate people to do things?

2.   Do blogs have possibility of accessing a collective intelligence?

3.  What are the potential problems with blogs?

The first two questions touch on the positive aspects of the blogosphere.  People are primarily motivated not by monetary rewards, but their ability to have a voice and to work together in an open source model in which they have an ability to tell their story.  This leads to the premise of “Wisdom of Crowds” which essentially theorizes that under the right conditions, the collective intelligence of the crowd is incredibly powerful.  Unfortunately, there is a significant downside to this collection of people within a network, which is displayed in the whole Riley Cooper fiasco.  Once you become a part of a network, the network has a tendency to shape your views and interactions with those who are members of the same network.  As a result, independent thought is often lost as the network tends to drive attention to things the network values.  In the Cooper case we see human nature as work as people continue to “pile on” without formulating their own independent thoughts to think about what has actually transpired.