A problem that could be solved by a large group is the finding of a book. Say that I don't remember the name or author of a book but have a vague idea of what it was about. A great way to get this problem solved would be to have a variety of people listen to your explanation of the plot and see who can tell you the name or any details about the book. Doing this without technology would require you to 1. find people who read and have knowledge of books in general and/or know books in the specific field of inquiry and 2. repeat the information you have about the book over and over again to many different people. Also, often the information you may think you know might be wrong or a little confused.
However, if there was a forum where you could write a quick post describing all the details you can remember, it would be easier and faster and would probably have a higher rate of success. The forum would not only allow you to find people who have the knowledge to answer your questions but the process itself would allow people to contribute information to each other and collaboratively arrive at a solution. What I mean by that is even if a forum member doesn't know the exact book one is talking about, he/she may perhaps be able to narrow the field down to certain authors or correct a mistake you made in the plot summary.
Vieweg et al. talks about how during the VTech crisis and the aftermath collective social gathering on Facebook, whenever someone posted information, the authenticity was not checked due to the "social capital" one had. The same occurrence may happen on the aforementioned forum: those who have proven themselves before (told through title/level achieved) would be thought of as more reliable and correct than those with no social capital. The article also talks about norm setting - this could occur in the forum in how a first-time poster interacts with the rest of the community, how people must answer questions or post about the book they are looking for etc.
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I thought that your book forum was a really good idea. I know there have been many times when I wanted to remember or refer to a certain book but I couldn't remember the author or title, only random bits and pieces. Even though I do think it's a good idea, I also think it would be extremely difficult to make this a successful system. There's just so many books out and I really think there would be a small probability of someone else recognizing the book you were referring to. However I think the system was more similar to Google, it could work okay. A lot of times I can just type a general description or even quote into Google and it returns someone else asking that same question only it's answered.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of having a book forum to enter and search for other's reviews of a particular book. An online system would seem to be more effective than trying to find people who read a given book and then asking for their input. There would need to be some motivational factor for posting reviews to the forum, otherwise there would be many members but no reviews to read. Perhaps there could be a rating system to increase one's individual rating based on number of comments or reviews written. Overall, nice post.
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