Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Groupthink

Dear Susan Cain,

I thought your views on groupthink we were very mind opening. I had always thought that groupthink was a good thing because of the many online collaboration projects that have dazzled me on the internet, but I think you are correct in saying that there are some people where its a bad things. Some people prefer to work in solitude to come up with brilliant ideas where they do not have to fight to have their ideas and voice heard.



As Shirky points out in the article, Wikipedia is not actually a free-form hive mind, but a place where information is gathered and put together through endless argumentation. I think wikipedia is actually a perfect example where people thought that wikipedia was this perfect working example of good groupthink. Because like Shirky said, those people do not actually understand how wikipedia works.

Groupthink provides us with many things that are free for everyone to use also. But is that really a good thing? Keen does not think so. Companies are the ones receiving the blow from these "free" things. He gives examples like youtube providing free music videos for people to watch and wikipedia's free information. But at the same time, if you think about all these services, not all of them are actually "Free". Youtube lets you watch these videos for free yes, but they also play ads before videos and they display ads on the side too. And if a company is smart, they ask people on youtube to advertise their products for them within the video. YesStyle sponsors and asks WongFu Productions to wear their products in their videos. As a result WongFu creates videos where they thank and tell their viewers how awesome YesStyle is, generating advertisement for the company.(As shown in the video below).


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