Posted on February 13, 2008 by Kathy McManus in All, Altruism, Internet Comments (1)
Crowd Scene
When adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane went missing over the remote Nevada desert in September 2007, there was no distress signal. But 50,000 people heard a call for help.
Without knowing each other or the man they were looking for, they formed an altruistic army of volunteer searchers, unprecedented in size and extraordinary in method. They scoured the 17,000 square mile search area not from Nevada airspace, but from cyberspace, logging on from computers around the world to scrutinize digital satellite images of the enormous suspected crash site.
The cyber search was run by Amazon.com, using a so-called crowd-sourcing internet program named Mechanical Turk. The theory is that a problem is more likely to be solved when thousands of people—a crowd—work on it. Though never designed for volunteer manhunts, Mechanical Turk’s potential in the Fossett case struck its director, Peter Cohen: “I still have an inherent belief that people will care about what happens to other people, and there will always be a way to harness that concern.”
And harness he did. The 50,000-strong crowd—each of whom had registered online—was sent random satellite images covering 278 square feet of rugged Nevada desert. Each image was examined separately by 10 volunteers, who were given one hour to look for anything resembling a downed aircraft before moving to the next photo. Suspicious sightings were flagged and forwarded to a professional search team. From the US to the UK, to Australia and beyond, the volunteer cyber searchers devoted hundreds, even thousands of hours each to the project. Why?
“I’m an inventor, so I admire Steve,” wrote a Canadian volunteer. “It’s a big loss for everyone. That’s why I’m trying to help.” A volunteer from England described his intense commitment to the search: “Sometimes an image pops up. My heart skips a beat and then sinks when I realize that it’s just farm machinery or something. I don’t know if I’m addicted. I am motivated.”
Ultimately, the ease of the internet could not overcome the difficulty of finding Steve Fossett’s small plane, the wreckage of which, according to a Fossett spokesperson, would resemble “a small pile of sticks” from the air. After eight weeks, Amazon closed down its online search, weeks after the official on-site search had been called off, and after seven other Nevada crash sites—some decades old—had been discovered.
What happened to Steve Fossett remains a mystery. But the crowd had seen a future for a new mass altruism.
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great!
I think that what happened here with all these people searching is great! Now they just need to do this every time anyone is missing in an area like that. Steve Fossett is no more important than someone’s child or a missing hiker or anyone else for that matter.