Stewardship of Human Collective Behavior

I've been interested in online collective intelligence for some time. Think of the new ways for humans to do things together that social media have catalyzed: virtual communities, smart mobs, social production, crowdsourcing, emergent response to disasters... Writing smart mobs brought me the insight that the widespread use of smartphones+Internet social affordances had lowered the barriers to collective action in the physical world. In 2005, my TED talk called for an interdisciplinary science of cooperation. It looks like that is happening.

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.