Science Fiction fans will be familiar with the idea of The Borg: a race of beings from the Star Trek franchise. These cyborg entities communicated to each other (the collective) using their built-in, high tech devices. Not unlike a hive of bees, The Borg were able to learn and adapt from the shared experiences of one another … a sort of collective intelligence.
Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, of mass communications and of mass behavior—a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.
We’ve seen forms of collective intelligence in such web media outlets as forums, blogs, etc. With Twitter, there is an immediacy and personalization that raises this phenomenon to a more powerful level because:
- Hand held devices with cellular service allow for communication to take place on the go. Tweets are much easier to provide by cell phone users than attempting to interface with a website. The advent of better smart phones have alleviated this problem to a degree. However, only a small segment of consumers have the new breed of smart phone. Those that do may be more likely to use Twitter to post information owing to its ease of use.
- While blogs and forums provide for group contribution, the communication occurs at a 3rd party repository that houses the information. Not so for Twitter. Twitter is about individuals communicating with individuals. When a message is broadcast, that message gets sent to 1400 people; not 1 website.
Companies are looking to leverage Twitter as a way to augment their business practices. Everyone from Dell, Comcast, Zappos and hundreds more are finding ways to utilize Twitter as a means to provide better customer support, build brand loyalty and so forth. But, I appreciate the more mundane uses that benefit people, not products.
The Wall Street Journal reports about one Mr. Rothamel who “once used the service to help identity some flowers growing in his front yard”. Others will never spend more than $40 on a purchase without first sending a tweet asking for advice. Stories such as these are widespread and common about the benefits of Twitter to the individual from the whole. It is this collective intelligence that makes it all possible.