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04 November 2008
The crowd that knew too much?
Blogging for the Demos think tank, Samuel Jones comments on a new piece by James Surowiecki in this week's New Yorker. In the article, Surowiecki suggests that one of the root causes of today's financial panic is that we simply have too much information coming at us. Jones makes an elegant suggestion: the problem might not be too much info, but too few ways to frame it and understand it:
It's not that masses of information is a bad thing, far from it. What is an issue, however, is how we manage it. The more we know, the more fragmented we can become, and - as Onora O'Neill wrote in her Reith Lectures - the harder it becomes to trust and operate within the institutions by which we seek to manage our society.
Read the blog post from Samuel Jones on Demos >>
Watch James Surowiecki's TEDTalk on the power of shared information >>
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