Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Although Wang et al. (
2009
) did not provide the original definition of HFS, they
suggested that HFS shared characteristics with crowd sourcing, social search,
collective intelligence, and distributed problem solving. They also pointed out
five characteristics of HFS: accessibility, popularization, centerlessness, informa-
tion timeliness, and convergence.
Wang et al. (
2010
) defined HFS as “A mass campaign, which comes into vogue
through the medium of internet, targeting at searching for the identity of a certain
person or the truth about a certain event, whose data collection depends partially on
the human force to filtering the information gained from the search engine, and
partially on the anonymous or real-name information announcement.” The HFS
process occurs within a short time, and in most cases, no matter how ambiguous or
clueless the problem is, finds a correct answer. Wang et al. (
2010
) identified two
characteristics of HFS. One is the importance of involvement of strong offline
elements (e.g., information acquisition through offline channels or some kind of
offline activism). The other is that almost all HFS rely on voluntary crowd sourcing.
In this study, we focused on HFS as a phenomenon that happens on social media
and as one of the usage processes of social media.
One reason why HFS can yield information from relatively few clues is the fact
that many users are engaged in search activities toward the same target, as opposed
to one individual. The effectiveness of HFS, however, does not only depend on the
large number of individuals involved; it also involves more sources of information
than one individual can access. In this way, HFS can be considered to use the
'wisdom of crowds'. Surowiecki (
2004
) identified four main elements needed to
exert the power of such wisdom: diversity of opinion, independence, decentraliza-
tion, and aggregation. Because HFS involves a large number of users who come
together from all walks of life through Internet, it tends to involve high level of
diversity and decentralization. It is also highly likely to involve users from a wide
range of backgrounds who can gather adequate offline information that cannot be
found through online searches. However, although HFS involves high levels of
independence, due to the lack of collective decision making, in most cases no
aggregation mechanism is available. Thus, while HFS can use the power of the
'wisdom of crowds', it cannot maximize the benefits of this wisdom.
14.4 Differences in Information Behavior Online and Offline
To understand the characteristics of HFS, it is useful to set out certain concepts
about information behavior online and offline because HFS is performed through
information behavior online and offline. First, we can distinguish between “sub-
stance” and “information”. Substance is a concept about a physical entity that exists
only in the real world (offline). In contrast, information is an aggregation of
symbols indicating some specific meaning and it can exist online and/or offline
according to the media on which the information is recorded.
