// new media class


David Friedrich — 2020 Crowdsourced Future

Measuring Instruments — Winter 2013

2020 Crowdsourced Future is a web-based platform that creates a knowledge-base of predictive statements to draw an image of what seem to be unmeasurable – the future. What will be the quality of the "crowds" collective vision opposed to a professional one?

The attempt is to examine the emergence of similar and related statements and thus to assign a value to a single statement in comparison.

Obviously, it is difficult to gain authentic probabilities with the approach of crowdsourcing, yet there may emerge some hints on which topics will become important. However, considering the rapidly growing amount of data on the internet and algorithms, which become more sophisticated, it is fairly easy to imagine of what data-analyzing systems might be capable of. Activity and behavior tracking already belongs to the commonly known background processes, which are associated with commercial placement.

In contrast there are also many exciting and useful applications. Nonetheless we have to raise the question whether we want everything to be measurable and predictable.