FW: msn slate - art mobs article

July 22, 2004

Type: discussion

http://slate.msn.com/id/2104087

Art Mobs
Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?
By Clive Thompson
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004, at 8:07 AM PT

Mobs have been getting unusually good press these days. In his excellent new
book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (a former Slate columnist)
argues that groups of people are smarter than any individual member. In
Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold showed how a massive gang of citizens connected
by mobile phones toppled the president of the Philippines. And every day the
unruly stock market, with its zillions of buy-and-sell orders, identifies a
hot or cold company long before any individual analyst can spot it. Crowds,
it seems, have a truly superhuman intelligence.

Now there's evidence they may even be creative. A few weeks ago,
Wikipedia