Representation in Self Portraiture This is a blog to keep track of my dissertation research and to help develop ideas in an organised manner.

Final thing to help my dissertation come to its conclusion.

The wisdom of the crowd is the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question.

 An intuitive and often-cited explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise
 ----Yi, S. K. M., Steyvers, M., Lee, M. D. and Dry, M. J. (April 2012). "The Wisdom of the Crowd in Combinatorial Problems".
    proof such as wikipedia, yahoo answers, relies on viewers opinion

This is how the world works in the justice world
The process, in the business world at least, was written about in detail by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds

Research within cognitive science has sought to model the relationship between wisdom of the crowd effects and individual cognition. 

First appeared when a large group of people try and guess a set amount such as the number of marbles in a jar, the mean number will be closer to the true amount than any other estimation, so the crowd is smarter than the individual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds:_Why_the_Many_Are_Smarter_Than_the_Few_and_How_Collective_Wisdom_Shapes_Business,_Economies,_Societies_and_Nations
 Surowiecki, James
 THE BOOK

Other social processes such as Redditt and Digg rely on this process too

 PROBLEM: affirms supperiority over the minority... What if many people were judging something which had no knowledge of it... e.g. Judging conceptual art when they have no concept of abstract art movement, and postmodernism...surely it would benefit from wisdom from the expert crowd.. also this is how we work in the world we live in, world leaders make decisions over the way the country is run, elected members.

 Scott E Page introduced the diversity prediction theorem: "The squared error of the collective prediction equals the average squared error minus the predictive diversity". Therefore, when the diversity in a group is large, the error of the crowd is small.
 Scott E. (2007). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/Q&A.html

The wisdom of the crowd effect is easily undermined. Social influence can cause the average of the crowd answers to be wildly inaccurate, while the geometric mean and the median are far more robust
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9020.full.pdf+html


CONCLUDING:  IMPORTANT
Since interpretations don't really have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer there will be a general accepted interpretation given all the information available... That way, there doesn't need to be any specific reliance on factual information about the representation. The accuracy of a representation can be down the the wisdom of the crowd... or does this again make our question irrelevant?
The accuracy of the representation would appear to be an invalid or irrelevant question, the nature of the photographer inherently biased will affect things and so in how things are it is the reader who is the determinate factor and so they would surmise given all available information 'This is what this photo means in relation to this author, and the evidence for which is this, and so the accepted interpretation is accepted by many, but OF COURSE will still be open to furtherment or advancement given any additional information and things will always be open to debate in the academic world. Nothing will ever be set in stone.



 


Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk