Tell me what to think!

New York, 1999: After a day which begun with our first drink at around noon, we wandered by the MTV studios in Times Square. We (attempted to) mix in with the bobbing crowd of teens, sarcastically yelling at Carson Daly to "tell me what to think! tell me what to wear! Tell me what to like!". Ah, the glory days. But as this article suggests, people tend to figure out what to like....by seeing what other people like. Not in and of itself groundbreaking....I am an admitted lifelong follower of people exponentially cooler than me. And, it explains how crappy music (Jessica Simpson) or crappy movies (any movie with Jessica Simpson) end up getting popular - people perceive them as popular and so they end up liking it (enough to shell out some bucks to buy it and then subsequently have it get buried underneath your car seat in the hopes that no one finds it anyway.) But this then begs the question: If we as a cultural mass of people tend to like what is universally liked, how does something initially get universally liked in the first place? The answer to this would be a marketer's dream...but even in my experience...I find that I tend to skim (at least I admit I don't read them) "Most Read" or "Most emailed" articles first. I explored a lot of "Best of 2007" music lists. It's a filter in our current world where information is infinite and we need a curator to sort through the noise.

Still nothing earthshattering. But there is a lot of technology emerging that is leveraging the wisdom of crowds. One such example is a device I read about which is a traditional GPS-based car navigation tool, but has wi-fi capabilities that pings any other car with the device. It can show you where other people are going to avoid traffic and alternate routes that other people are taking who are trying to go where you are going (wow that was a horribly written sentence). This device...needs a certain critical mass in order to be useful (i.e., enough people need to have it installed) for its social feature to be useful. But what if everyone has it? Then everyone would know about the all the allegedly quick routes, and would, logically, pursue the same route - thereby making it not the fastest route (if you assume that more traffic = slower). In a world where everyone knows everyone else's preferences, the best way to optimize your outcome could be to not do what everyone else is doing. On the other hand, if you have a small circle of people who are crowdsourcing to share information, then you still may be able to use this bigger pool of knowledge (bigger than your own) to optimize your outcome, since only a select few of you would benefit.

So I kind of lost myself in that last paragraph, but I guess I am feeling that I am bombarded with so much shit that I need trusted sources to filter out content. On the other hand, if I rely solely on filters to inform myself, I'll actually be less informed because I will know exactly what other people know. Is it possible that as we get access to more information, we actually know less?