Replay: James Surowiecki shares Five Things He's Learned About the Wisdom and Madness of Social Media
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
"We’ll look at why spreading misinformation works, how you can recognize it, and how you can debunk it without managing to reinforce it. And we’ll talk about how you can make yourself a better, sharper user of social media and the Internet. In the process, I hope the class will help you make your time online more enjoyable and productive, and our collective crowd a little bit wiser."
– James Surowiecki, Five Things I've Learned About The Wisdom and Madness of Social Media
James Surowiecki is a celebrated journalist and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. He was the business columnist for The New Yorker for 17 years, and has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New York Review of Books. Here’s the first five minutes of James’ 90-minute class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about how the Internet continues to reshape the way we learn and think – and why, for all of its promise, social media seems to be creating as many problems as it solves.
Five Things I’ve Learned about the Wisdom and Madness of Social Media shares what James has learned both about how we learn and the ways that being in groups—including online ones—shape our behavior. He explains the great degree to which social media amplifies the power of conformity and peer pressure and discusses in detail ways to combat these sometimes subtle, sometimes overpowering, forces.
Most importantly, he discusses how under the right conditions groups of people could be remarkably intelligent, smarter even than the smartest person within them. The key to the wisdom of crowds, he explains, is having groups made up of diverse, independent thinkers who are able to learn from each other but still think for themselves. We're smartest collectively, he explains, when people are acting as much like individuals as possible.
If you want to better understand the power, the dangers, and still potent potential of social media, this class is for you.
James was the business columnist for The New Yorker for seventeen years, and he has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New York Review of Books. He has also written and co-produced two documentaries for ESPN. These days, he blogs at Medium.com, and teaches English at Yale University.
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