vivian shaw

Congratulations, anonymous commenter!

You just solved the United States’ projected budget deficits of $418 billion and $1,345 billion for 2015 and 2030!

It’s worthwhile to keep a close eye on the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. Not only does crowdsourcing appeal to an American sense of democracy, but it’s amenable to a diversity of forms—which, on top of news media and blogging, includes scientific research and philanthropy. Its rise is timely too. Arguably, crowdsourcing would be impossible without the exponential growth of the digital world and social media. As the narrative might follow, an increasingly democratized online—wherein the digital divide is narrowed across racial, socioeconomic, and age indicators—translates to more brains, and a greater variety among them. We can also frame this statistically: as new groups log in, the digital world improves as a sample, better representing the shape of the population as a whole. Crowdsourcing, then, would improve as a portrait describing the innovations, knowledges, and dollars of the people.

Or, so we would imagine optimistically. The flip side of this story would suggest that crowdsourcing is more like a front stage, where individuals can believe themselves to participate in a digital democracy, without assurance that this voting converts to any actual outcome on the “back end.” Along this analysis, we can consider if crowdsourcing primarily functions as a marketing strategy—both to attract eyes to a marketable product and to aggregate voluntary information from viewers, facilitating development of future products.

Finally, here’s an interesting observation from the New York Times’ write-up of how readers played the game: “The most popular option among all respondents? Reducing the military to less than its size before the Iraq war — included in about 80 percent of the solutions posted to Twitter. But cutting pay and benefits for the military was a choice of only 40 percent.”