Week 10 Lecture

Multiplicity was explored at a further level during this weeks lecture explaining how collective activity is far more effective in gaining and displaying information. A good example was given in the book 'The Wisdom of Crows' by James Surowiecki. In this book a crowd was asked to guess the weight of ox. It turned out that the average guessed weight was closer to any individual guess which I found very interesting. The fact that no single person could guess the weight. but together finding a closer weight is a prime example of multiplicity.

The concept of multiplicity is especially prominent today in web 2.0. Wikipedia for example depends on other people from around the world to post articles and edit them accordingly. This gives it a much stronger collection of information than any other site. There was also a really interesting idea called 'Photosynth' that used the site Flickr to gather photos of a particular site around the world and create a 3D map of it that the user can explore. This technology is the first of its kind and is sure to harness the true power of networking and multiplicity.