The Creativity Of Crowds?

from the collaboration-nation dept

With all the talk about smart mobs and the wisdom of crowds, everyone seems to be looking at how we're becoming a collaboration nation -- working together to get stuff done. However, when it comes to more creative works of art, it appears the mob mentality doesn't work so well. In some, more highly structured areas it does seem to work okay. Wikipedia is used as an example, where a large collaborative group has done very creative work. However, more free form artistic works seem to fizzle as the lack of direction basically leads to very little worth talking about. With Wikipedia, the structure is clear and it's easy to see how someone can add in their own part. Other collaborative art projects get bogged down however, as no one knows where to begin -- or where everyone disagrees on where to begin.