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Crowdsourcing and Social Media: Their Real Impact
Crowdsourcing and Social Media: Their
Real Impact
By Sharon Housley
It seems that our society is growing
ever more dependent on social media; more and more people
are joining social networking giants such as Twitter,
Instagram, and Facebook, and more such websites and
applications are springing up to meet the rising demand
for them. As society and culture continue this turn
towards technology, so do the operations of society,
especially through crowdsourcing. A powerful tool, crowdsourcing
does much good, but has also caused a number of problems.
In such a situation, one must ask: do the benefits of
crowdsourcing really outweigh the risks
By placing trust in the masses, crowdsourcing has proven
a useful tool. As of late, many searches for missing
people have evolved from the more primitive crowdsourcing
of magazines and posters and have moved to social media.
Details about many missing people and their cases are
frequently posted on websites like Facebook, Reddit,
and Tumblr. In the case of Reddit, several subcommunities,
called subreddits, are often employed in each search,
and users of the site respond with support and sometimes
additional information or reports of sightings. By expanding
the audience and heightening the efficiency of these
efforts, social media can make searches for missing
people more effective as well as provide a larger support
network for those searching.
Crowdsourcing's power to help people does
not stop with searches for missing people. This idea
is exemplified by the response of social media to the
Boston Marathon bombings of 2013. In the days following
the bombings, Reddit enjoyed huge readership as its
users both worked to identify the bombers through crowdsourcing
and posted frequent, accurate, and very current updates
of the hunt for the bombers and its surrounding events.
In doing this, social media contributed to the important
identification of the bombers and helped protect the
safety of those living in or near Boston in the bombing's
aftermath.
The power of crowds is immense. While this allows for
many benefits and positive uses of mass media, it also
makes problems inevitable in a society that relies so
heavily on such media. The effects of this double-edged
sword can be observed in the online response to the
Boston Marathon bombings. While crowdsourcing through
social media proved helpful at this time, it also led
to the mistaken naming of Sunil Tripathi, later proven
to be an innocent Brown student who had been missing
for a month prior to the bombing, as a prime suspect.
Tripathi undeservedly received so much negative attention
that his name was a top trend on Twitter, and never
had the opportunity to comment on the affair or defend
himself.
More prevalent than the harm online crowdsourcing
can cause is perhaps its potential for failure. While
online crowdsourcing is popularly used in cases such
as those of missing people, the question of its relative
efficacy at this task must be raised. While much of
the search for missing people has moved to social media,
there does not appear to be significantly more success
in finding missing people from online crowdsourcing
than there is from posters, magazine ads, and other
earlier methods of outreach. In other words, crowdsourcing
through social media may simply not be as enormously
effective as we hope.
The variety of consequences (and the lack
thereof) of crowdsourcing through social media leaves
the task of assessing it complicated, at best. Though
this can make a discussion of crowdsourcing difficult,
the ever-growing presence in our lives of crowdsourcing
and the social media upon which it relies makes such
discussions important. The verdict remains for each
person to establish for themselves.
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc.
http://www.notepage.net
, FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds
and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for
RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com
audio recording and editing software.
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