Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
by four separate people in 1847. And radio was invented at the same time around 1900 by Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla.
Why would the same ideas occur to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment. They’re “inevitable.” When they’re ready to emerge, they do. This is because we, the folks coming up with the ideas, do not work in a sealed-off, Rodin’s Thinker fashion. The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand. If four astronomers discovered sunspots at the same time, it’s partly because the quality of lenses in telescopes in 1611 had matured to the point where it was finally possible to pick out small details on the sun and partly because the question of the sun’s role in the universe had become newly interesting in the wake of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. If radio was developed at the same time by two people, that’s because the basic principles that underpin the technology were also becoming known to disparate thinkers. Inventors knew that electricity moved through wires, that electrical currents caused fields, and that these seemed to be able to jump distances through the air. With that base of knowledge, curious minds are liable to start wondering: Could you use those signals to communicate? And as Ogburn and Thomas noted, there are a lot of curious minds. Even if you assume the occurrence of true genius is pretty low (they estimated that one person in one hundred was in the “upper tenth” for smarts), that’s still a heck of a lot of geniuses.
When you think of it that way, what’s strange is not that big ideas occurred to different people in different places. What’s strange is that this didn’t happen all the time, constantly.
But maybe it did—and the thinkers just weren’t yet in contact. Thirty-nine years after Ogburn and Thomas, sociologist Robert Merton took up the question of multiples.18 (He’s the one who actually coined the term.) Merton’s work uncovered an interesting corollary, which is that when inventive people aren’t aware of what others are working on, the pace of innovation slows. One survey of mathematicians, for example, found that 31 percent complained that they had needlessly duplicated work that a colleague was doing—because they weren’t aware it was going on. Had they known of each other’s existence, they could have collaborated and accomplished their calculations more quickly or with greater insight.
As an example, there’s the tragic story of Ernest Duchesne,19 the original discoverer of penicillin. As legend has it, Duchesne was a student in France’s military medical school in the mid-1890s when he noticed that the stable boys who tended the army’s horses did something peculiar: they stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a PhD thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only twenty-three at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duschesne died fifteen years later during his military service, reportedly of tuberculosis. It would take another thirty-two years for Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. Untold millions of people died in those three decades of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.
When you can resolve multiples and connect people with similar obsessions, the opposite happens. People who are talking and writing and working on the same thing often find one another, trade ideas, and collaborate. Scientists have for centuries intuited the power of resolving multiples, and it’s part of the reason that in the seventeenth century they began publishing scientific journals and setting standards for citing the similar work of other scientists. Scientific journals and citation were a successful attempt to create a worldwide network, a mechanism for not just thinking in public but doing so in a connected way. As the story of Duchesne shows, it works pretty well, but not all the time.
Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.
As an example of this, consider what happened next to Ory Okolloh.20 During the upheaval after the rigged Kenyan election of 2007, she began tracking incidents of government violence. People called and e-mailed her tips, and she posted as many as she could. She wished she had a tool to do this automatically—to let anyone post an incident to a shared map. So she wrote about that:
Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something—any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?
One of the people who saw Okolloh’s post was Erik Hersman, a friend and Web site developer who’d been raised in Kenya and lived in Nairobi. The instant Hersman read it, he realized he knew someone who could make the idea a reality. He called his friend David Kobia, a Kenyan programmer who was working in Birmingham, Alabama. Much like Okolloh, Kobia was interested in connecting Kenyans to talk about the country’s crisis, and he had created a discussion site devoted to it. Alas, it had descended into political toxicity and calls for violence, so he’d shut it down, depressed by having created a vehicle for hate speech. He was driving out of town to visit some friends when he got a call from Hersman. Hersman explained Okolloh’s idea—a map-based tool for reporting violence—and Kobia immediately knew how to make it happen. He and Hersman contacted Okolloh, Kobia began frantically coding with them, and within a few days they were done. The tool allowed anyone to pick a location on a Google Map of Kenya, note the time an incident occurred, and describe what happened. They called it Ushahidi—the Swahili word for “testimony.”
Within days, Kenyans had input thousands of incidents of electoral violence. Soon after, Ushahidi attracted two hundred thousand dollars in nonprofit funds and the trio began refining it to accept reports via everything from SMS to Twitter. Within a few years, Ushahidi had become an indispensable tool worldwide, with governments and nonprofits relying on it to help determine where to send assistance. After a massive earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, a Ushahidi map, set up within hours, cataloged twenty-five thousand text messages and more than four million tweets over the next month. It has become what Ethan Zuckerman, head of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, calls “one of the most globally significant technology projects.”
The birth of Ushahidi is a perfect example of the power of public thinking and multiples. Okolloh could have simply wandered around wishing such a tool existed. Kobia could have wandered around wishing he could use his skills to help Kenya. But because Okolloh was thinking out loud, and because she had an audience of like-minded people, serendipity happened.
The tricky part of public thinking is that it works best in situations where people aren’t worried about “owning” ideas. The existence of multiples—the knowledge that people out there are puzzling over the same things you are—is enormously exciting if you’re trying to solve a problem or come to an epiphany. But if you’re trying to make money? Then multiples can be a real problem. Because in that case you’re trying to stake a claim to ownership, to being the first to think of something. Learning that other people have the same idea can be anything from annoying to terrifying.
Scientists themselves are hardly immune. Because they want the fame of discovery, once they learn someone else is working on a similar problem, they’re as liable to compete as to collaborate—and they’ll bicker for decades over who gets credit. The story of penicillin illustrates this as well. Three decades after Duchesne made his discovery of pencillin, Alexander Fleming in 192821 stumbled on it again, when some mold accidentally fell into a petri dish and killed off the bacteria within. But Fleming didn’t