In chapter one of Convergence Culture, Jenkins talks a lot about collective intelligence and uses the show Survivor as a real world example of it. I think that when people put their minds together, they can come up with all sorts of new ideas that individually would have never came about. However, with most things, there is also a downside. While surfing the internet about collective intelligence, I found several websites that talked about an idea called collective stupidity. It’s the idea that as a group, people can come up with some very dumb ideas and do dumb things. In an article about Collective Stupidity, author Sean Gorman cites a 45 minute traffic jam due to people slowing down to gawk at someone pulled over and rumors that are quickly spread by crowds as examples of the negative side of collective intelligence. He says that sometimes, as a group, we can easily only focus on what is right in front of us, losing sight of the bigger picture. I think a lot of what he says in his article is true but I think that collective intelligence is a lot more common in everyday life than collective stupidity is. A lot of seemingly simple things actually require the work of many people and without everyone working together, these things would not get done.
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