The Limits of Crowds

The Gulf oil spill is the first major technical disaster in the age of social media, and social media have shaped people's response to the disaster in several ways. The oil itself is constantly visible, available for anyone to monitor via a Web cam at the mouth of the well. The response to the disaster has also been shaped by the use of social media, as BP and other interested parties have undertaken several initiatives to leverage the expertise of the general public. Underlying the praise for these efforts is a new set of assumptions about the nature and value of expertise, influenced by the rise of social media and especially by what has come to be called "crowdsourcing." Trust in the expert appears to be increasingly supplanted by a willingness to rely on the knowledge derived from crowds of amateurs. Crowdsourcing can be great, and it offers a wonderful complement to engineered solutions in some situations.