Psychology of Social Media Class Week 6 Reflection June 4

In this week the class focused on the positive side of the social media. The crowd sourcing was discussed as one of the biggest benefits people can get from social media. Whether group discussion help people make batter choice or not has been a question that bother people for centuries. According to the article “Wisdom of the Crowd” from the NOVA science journal, in the middle 1800s, mathematician Francis Galton was the first person to test the power of the crowd sourcing through statistics. In his experiment, he asked 800 people to guess the weight of a dead ox. Surprisingly, out of these 800 participants, no individual could accurately find out the weight of the ox. In fact, the majority of them were way too high or way to low. Nevertheless, when Francis Galton taken everybody’s answers and take average of it, it the answer was exactly accurate! In other word, the average of all the guess is actually right! According to statistics, the more data we have, the higher chance we will have a normal distribution. This is called the “central limit theorem.” Given this knowledge, it is obvious that the crowd sourcing social media such as Yahoo Answer or Ask.com actually help people getting better solutions. In the article “So you think you’re smarter than a CIA agent,” the “good judgment project”, which train a group of regular people to do predictions, was introduced. Surprisingly, with a little bit training and good search, a group of normal civilians can have 30% better prediction than CIA agents who have access to all the classified files. Moreover, the website “Phylo” even have the idea to use the crowd sourcing to contribute genetic disease research. The process of identifying and catching the Boston bombers is another example of the advantage of crowd sourcing. In the gospel point of view, the only reason why social media was developed is to spread and share the gospel. Dr. Kinghorn shared a great story of how he met with another professor in New York who also named Brian Kinghorn. In the end of their meeting, the other Dr. Kinghorn was interested to the church.

Another advantage the social media and provide is the ability to change public opinions. According to the videos and articles shown by Dr. Kinghorn, social media is a powerful tool when fighting against big business and big institutions. Examples ranged from the complaint against United Airline to the protest against the racist police officers and to the Arab Spring. Whereas traditional Medias could be controlled and oppressed by the “big brothers,” Internet social media provides free access to anyone in any place. Although the credibility of Internet social media can sometime be debatable, it is no doubt the best anti-oppression way of communication.