The Dumbness vs. Wisdom of Crowds

Sometimes Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users has such a clear handle on state of the customer world.

I'll use her words in her recent post "The Dumbness of Crowds" to express the point I've been warring about with well-intentioned but  very wrong community advocates for awhile "no matter what, I believe that in our quest to exploit the "We" in Web, we must not sacrifice the "I" in Internet."

Two poignant and frustrating examples of our rush to collaborative Web 2.0 mania and a countering appreciation for what Collective Intelligence provides (there is a big difference):

1) "Collective Intelligence" is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough.
(It's not always the averaging that's the problem it's the blindly part)

2) "Collective Intelligence" is about the community on Threadless, voting and discussing t-shirts designed by individuals.

"Dumbness of Crowds" would be expecting the Threadless community to actually design the t-shirts together as a group.

Art isn't made by committee.

Great design isn't made by consensus.

True wisdom isn't captured from a crowd.

At least not when the crowd is acting as a single entity.

I'll add one - insight is knowing what everybody knows and finding something that  noone has thought, compromise is a focus group.

A great quote from Kurt Vonnegut by way of Lovemarks sums up Kathy's "dumnbess" mantra perfectly  "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre".