Wisdom of the Crowd: People Are Lonely, for Being Lone

For my final for Reading and Writing Electronic Text, I am exploring using the “wisdom of the crowd” to answer a simple question: What is the experience of loneliness?

The idea of answering a question using the “wisdom of the crowd” is derived from an experiment by Sir Francis Galton in 1907, when he asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. Individual responses varied wildly, but the average of all these responses was within one pound of the real weight of the ox. The wisdom of the crowd uses the collective opinion of a group of individuals to answer a question. Modern day examples include Wikipedia and Google.

I collected from the internet ~100 quotes on the experience of loneliness from well-known people throughout history. I wrote a program in Python to mashup the wisdom quotes by combining portions of each quote together to create new quotes, in effect sampling from my loneliness canon. I took my mashed-up quotes, and used character markov-chain analysis to generate new text that is statistically similar to the original quotes. I ran my statistically generated text through the markov-chain analysis 1-3 times, just to make sure my text was nicely average.

So, according to the wisdom of the crowd, what is the experience of loneliness?

• People are Lonely, for Being Lone
• Loneliness can be conquered only by Lonely people
• If you’re lonely than There is a loneliness
• Loneliness is more lonely
• People are lonely when you’re alone

I used this generative collective wisdom to create a poem, three stanzas in length, to help distill the wisdom of the crowd on the topic of loneliness. Many thanks to the intellects whose wisdom I stole to inform this new poetic form:

On Loneliness 

I.
Loneliness and the feeling of being alone and

At times! But you have to wait for

Don’t try to hog loneliness is proof that
No one ever discovers the depth

Loneliness. The eternal quest of the world

But the most daring thing is to create.

Loneliness and keep it, We’re born alone, we live alone,

It’s no good trying to get rid of

To be lonely as our secrets. People are lonely, for being Lone.

II.
If you are all so much together, but

belong, People are lonely. At the artist needs is loneliness is the profoundest

An artist needs no words – it is

Nothing you can’t even know why, some people are lonely

Be good trying to each other can
Be good to be alone. I
Be good and you will do. Loneliness.

Love and I belong, Accept your lonely and I belong

I was never alone in the Lonely people

III.

An artist is always alone, Nobody, but nobody

people drain me, even know At the innermost core of
When so many are never less alone, we

Loneliness is more loneliness is, We’re born alone Nobody, but

A man is never completely alone. Loneliness may spur you
very often. Some nights are lonely when by We’re born

Loneliness is the profoundest fact of the world
makes you exceptional, if you are all so much together,

It’s no good, I’ll only being who knows

For contrast, a few of the quotes from the original source text:

• “And if I’m alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.” - Paul Coelho
• “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”- Tennessee Williams
• “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.” -Anais Nin

The poem itself sounds like a collective babble of disjointed voices murmuring about the experience of loneliness without coming to any particular conclusion, or saying anything profound. Each line of the poem tries very hard to be profound, but then falls flat without saying anything enlightening. I like the farcical conclusion that “loneliness is more lonely,” the crowd defining loneliness against itself.

And, the code!