The Wisdom of Crowds

So the whole 'Wisdom of Crowds' meme has hit the mainstream.

Time magazine declared the person of the year to be 'You' , citing Wikipedia, YouTube, and
MySpace.

Nature put Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia up against each other head to head; and found that if Britannica has an edge its a slender one indeed.  Britannica of course, replied furiously...  the whole exchange can be found online.  Personally I think I'm inclined to trust Nature, probably the most prestigious scientific journal in existance, over an organization with strong business and personal reasons to object.

Now the common understanding of this phenomena is that it represants something new that has recently been enabled by advances in information technology.  I'd like to put forth the idea that individual authorship is whats new and that much of human wisdom is aggregated from multiple sources.  Anything proceeding the invention of writing, the oral history of the human race seems to me to fall into this category.  For example: most historians feel that the Illiad and the Odyssey to have been the product of many singer-poets (aoidoi) which was standardized into a canonical text, with Homer being more a title given to this aggregate than a single individual.  Sounds a lot like the wisdom of crowds to me.   This is also very true of other cultures myths and stories. 

Following the invention of writing distinct notions of authorship were created and have gained a great deal of authority.  Auteur theory in cinema presents directors as the authors of films, putting a distinct philosophical stamp on each of their works.  Is this particularly credible however?  In a film we have the influence of the screenwriter, the producers casting decisions, the cinematographers decisions, the actors interpretation, even the costume designers, set designers, and so on have an important role to play and influence the final product in complicated ways.  Isn't this also a crowd?  Isn't there also a sort of emergent wisdom here?

Perhaps wisdom has always been something that emerges from the interaction of human beings?  From our discussions and debates, from people bouncing ideas off each other and new ideas appearing...