One of the lifelines offered to contestants struggling to answer a question in TV’s insanely popular “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” is to Phone a Friend. The friend, if chosen wisely, will come up with the correct answer and the lucky player is on their way to riches.
It struck me that life’s increasingly like that. Sure, we’ve heard of people phoning their mates in the middle of pub quizzes and the like. But, how about this:
“…..two teen girls surveying the cosmetics aisle in Portland, Maine’s Target store. Low-slung jeans, tiny purses, standing hand on hip, consulting each other about colors and brands. Then one flips open a sparkly cellphone, speed dials, and asks someone in the know: “So does Almay test on animals?” They move down the aisle a little. “How about Sonia Kashuk?” “ Iconoculture on Teen Ethics.
A more formal way of doing the same thing is Cellphedia, whose founder Limor Garcia (yet another NYU graduate) and I shared a platform at Wikimania (pictured).
You use Cellphedia by smsing a question to a central server, which then distributes the question to a group of volunteers. If they know the answer, they sms the server, which sends it on the the person asking the question. Limor calls it a cross between Wikipedia and Google.
You can see examples of the type of questions here and they range from things like “Whats the word 4 injection under the skin. not into vein” Answer: Subcutaneous to “Is lamb red meat?” Answer (just in case you were wondering): Yes.
Currently, the the system works by offering the questioner the first answer received. Some would argue that this makes the answer potentially flawed. However, counter-intuitively there seems to be little evidence that many wrong answers are actually submitted. If you are the first to reply, you have to be pretty confident that you’re right and the kinds of people who subscribe to these services are probably knowledgeable enough and aware enough of their own limitations to hold back when they’re in doubt.
The outcome is very similar to Wikipedia – with so many people contributing in a largely unsupervised way, you’d expect it to be riddled with inaccuracies, both accidental and deliberate. But somehow, it just works and this is the spirit and result that pervades Cellphedia.
But whether you rely on your friends or a service like Cellphedia, you’ve never been closer to instant knowledge about anything you need to know, even when out and about. This has profound implications for society, not just for makers of animal-tested cosmetics and producers of quiz programmes.
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