I’ve pontificated many times on exactly how democratic and open certain social media tools like Twitter, FriendFeed and specifically Digg are. The idea is in most social media is that by getting a crowd together engaged in a great big free-for-all discussion, there will magically occur this effect known as “Wisdom of the Crowds.” For sociology students and readers of my editorials, we know that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unsurprisingly, the Barack Obama transition team doesn’t read my editorials here, and they’ve fallen into the same trap that most armchair Web 2.0 pundits do in assuming that by putting up a Digg-style forum, the Web 2.0 fairies will sprinkle their pixie dust on the site and grant them a perfectly democratic, crowd-wise forum for the open exchange of ideas.

The Politico had the story this afternoon:

President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list. It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using — and abusing — a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama's website. The Blagojevich questions — many of them polite and reasonable — can be found only by searching words in them, like "Blagojevich," which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site. "Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will 'serious' campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?" asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California. "This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate," reads the text underneath it.

The question is reasonable, offers the team a way to address something that is both topical and relevant. It isn’t as if the question being asked refers to Obama’s citizenship, something that is a highly touchy subject in most circles.

Digg Isn’t True Wisdom of Crowds, and Isn’t the Best Model for What Obama’s Team Wants

Or perhaps it is – perhaps the Obama team is arrogant enough to imagine that the will of the people will always be with them, they’ll always have a dedicated bury brigade, and thus don’t have a truly transparent government in mind for us Americans.

Taking off the goggles of cynicism for a moment, though, let’s assume that isn’t their goal. Let’s assume they’re wanting to apply Web 2.0 principles of crowd wisdom to achieve an open and transparent government. Let’s review some pearls of Mashable wisdom to see why the Digg model isn’t a great way to accomplish that:

Pete first talked about this problem back in January of 2006 in response to an incident in which O’Reilly Network’s Steve Mallett was very publicly accused of stealing Digg intellectual property:

…Digg is not a true example of a wisdom of crowds system. Let me explain… For the wisdom of crowds to work, every individual must work independently. For example, if I ask 1000 people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar and then average the results, I’ll get a fairly accurate answer. However, if I allow the individuals to view the guesses of others before they vote, they may decide to give an answer which is similar to those given by other members of the group. Hence, it is more likely that the average answer will be inaccurate. The reason that Digg creates a mob mentality is that users can see how other members have acted before they vote.

In October of 2007, I went back to the basics in my dissection of Digg and analyzed whether or not I thought it to be utilizing Wisdom of the Crowds or just simply a social voting mechanism loosely based on the concept:

The anecdote that is the genesis for the concept of wisdom of crowds I’ve heard many times over is the story of scientist and statistician Francis Galton from the late 1800’s, who was surprised that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered weight of an ox. What made it interesting was not that any one individual came close to guessing the actual weight, but that the crowd did. When their individual guesses were calculated to the median, the resulting number was much closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most individual crowd members, and perhaps most surprisingly also closer than any of the estimates made by cattle experts.

In September of this year, I took the Galton example and applied it to the failures of Web 2.0 crowd wisdom in providing any sort of a solution for intelligent discourse in the context of the campaigns:

Systems like Digg and YouTube have worked to mitigate these effects with the voting up or down of comments and the discussion points themselves, but due to the populist nature of the system, only the most controversial of topics tend to rise to the top. Elements of controversy commonly walk hand in hand with the disqualifying factors for the wisdom of crowds to truly be applied in an effective manner: emotional or divisive topics.

What are the Solutions to Counteracting the Bury Brigade?

That’s a good question for Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. The only solution, given the limitations of the system that the Obama transition team has chosen to use for their forum is the time tested employment of human moderation. The team must, in the absence of the Digg-like sophisticated algorithms designed to counteract ideological bury brigades, go through and evaluate buried items.

This, of course, puts them in an awkward position given that they’ll be inclined to let tough questions get buried. They are, though, under intense scrutiny no matter which way they go. As the Politico piece noted, “So far, Obama's team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.”

Even a lay person recognizes that a human must work to counteract the mob mentality, and the absence of action on the Obama team’s part will only work to emphasize the naiveté they were accused of throughout the election.

Simply put, for all their effort, Web 2.0 hasn’t solved the problem of Mob Mentality in social systems. Any experienced and social media-savvy person knows this. That the Obama team doesn’t is very telling.

[img courtesy Techipedia]