M' ost of us have a handful of strong ties-close, trusted friends-
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but we can have hundreds of so-called weak ties (for example, our Facebook "friends"). Weak ties have high value as multipliers of our attention capacity, and as a source of tips for good shopping deals, job possibilities, and dating partners.16
When we coordinate what we see and what we know, our ef
forts in tandem multiply our cognitive wealth. While at any given moment our quota for working memory remains small, the total of data we can pull through that narrow width becomes huge. This collective intelligence, the sum total of what everyone in a distrib uted group can contribute, promises maximal focus, the summa tion of what multiple eyes can notice.
A research center at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology on collective intelligence sees this emerging capacity as abetted by the sharing of attention on the Internet. The classic example: mil lions of websites cast their spotlight within narrow niches-and a Web search selects and directs our focus so we can harvest all that cognitive work efficiently.17
The MIT group's basic question: "How can we connect people and computers so that collectively we act with more intelligence than any one person or group?"
Or, as the Japanese say, "All of us are smarter than any one of us."