Always On Crowds

     The Internets ability to work together to find something, or crowd sourcing, is a fascinating thing, especially since some people cant even work that well together. The only problem is that the Internet can come together to be helpful, and end up being very wrong. This is shown very well with the peoples beliefs that they had found the Boston Bomber before the police had. The used the images that they found of the bombing to figure out who the bomber was. They even decided that they had figured out exactly what the bomb looked like based off of these images. The only problem: they were completely  wrong. 

     In the picture above it shows what they thought was the backpack that the bombers used and they're even saying that the guy with the blurred face is the bomber, he wasn't. While its great that all of these people came together to help solve a problem it didn't work, an had the FBI actually taken this into consideration they could have gotten the wrong person and that would have just created an even bigger mess than was already there. 

     On the other hand it is possible for people to solve problems. Facebook and Reddit users actually solved the case of a boy that had gone missing twenty years before. They created an image and had it posted all over the Internet, until people began to figure out who the boy, dubbed Grateful Doe, was. The people that helped figure this out helped close a cold case while also helping the boys mother move on. Below is the image that was posted for people to see, the image that actually helped find out what had happened to "Grateful Doe".

     In this instance crowd sourcing actually worked to help solve an important issue, but what about when people use crowed sourcing for something stupid? Does that still make it useful to the world? There is an entire database for Bigfoot sightings in America, this is an example of using crowd sourcing for something stupid. They have all of their sightings organized by state, which you can see below, and then by county within each state. While some states haven't had any updates in recent years, some are very up to date, which shows us where all of the crazies live in our country. 

     Crowd sourcing can be used for very helpful things on the Internet, like finding a missing person, or idiotic things, like finding Bigfoot. It can also be wrong when it thinks it is completely right, like with the Boston Bomber. I think this shows us that crowd sourcing can be great, or it can be a complete disaster, lets all hope that there is some middle ground out there somewhere.