By now, most people should have heard about the wisdom of crowds, and probably also know what it means - that when a big enough number of people collaborate, the aggregated knowledge of this group of people is bigger than any expert on any given topic. Everybody who haven't been living under a rock have heard about Wikipedia, which is perhaps the best example on this effect - many, many thousands of individuals spend a bit of time each, and the result is an encyclopedia that can take on even Encyclopædia Britannica - and win - something made even more impressive, considering that Encyclopædia Britannica was given a 200 years head start.

Deep down in this collaboration phenomena lies something I find very beautiful, even though it's not very obvious on Wikipedia. Let's instead focus on horizontal culture authoring in a read-write society. Like the blogosphere. Or sampling music. Or youtube videos. Or any other kind of mashup culture, really.

I believe that every person is "born with" a little bit of unique cultural expression. That can be used in private, to create mediocre culture, or it can be used in collaboration with others to create great works - either in a two way collaboration, or by sampling, remixing and reworking old works. And just as with the wisdom of crowds create a work bigger than all it's pieces, the end results are better than all the little pieces used along the way. However, unlike on Wikipedia, the personal touch and the subjective view is valued, instead of frown upon. And here lies the beauty of crowds: in fragile, ephemeral, individual expressions, based on a collective foundation of works, the expression itself becoming part of that foundation, that others in turn base their expressions on. And all along the way, these expressions are a way of reflecting the humans that created them, that themselves are no less and no more unique than their works, and who's thoughts, ideas and DNA being part of the same life cycle.

Sampling music is one of the most obvious examples, if for no other reason than that it is a common ingredient in mainstream music, which means many have heard examples of it. It's also common that peoples musical preferences diverge quite a lot, which makes it quite possible to base a song that I love and you hate on something you love and I hate. It's not the only example, though. I personally find blogs filled with even more crowd-based beauty. Generally not the diary-style blogs, since it lacks the remixing component, but rather political and/or philosophical ones, that bases their content on thinking, usually starting out with the thinking of others, adding their own thinking and thus transforming of the content before posting it themselves. Interesting concepts thus bounce around the blogosphere for a while, constantly being transformed, bit by bit. Pirates have been talking about this peer-to-peer production of cultural works for year, but I guess I'm a bit slow to understand.

I like to think of the Internet as one gigantic art exhibition, a collage of life stories, displaying millions of people in a mentally naked form. Everyone is given an empty sheet of paper and a few questions to answer, like "who are you?", "what's the meaning of life?", "what do you believe in?", everyone answering their own way. However, this exhibition is bigger than anything any artist could ever pull off, it is constantly replacing it's pieces and constantly expanding. The human portraits are in some instances extremely cartoonish, while in other cases, they are as vibrant and alive as any novelist or director could ever make them.

And finally, what I really like about this beauty of crowds, is that with this unrestricted, status-free access to each other, with this bazaar known as the internet, technology is allowing us to be more human, gives us even more power to express ourselves, to work together and cooperate, and making us less bland and generic. Exactly what almost all technology is supposed to do, but what it just as often fails to deliver.