Testing the waters - Where could collective intelligence get us?

"Collective Intelligence"...
I probably could have imagined what one would mean by the term - some way for people to collect their knowledge and share it with others, so that, if all the members in a group were a piece of a machine, the machine could do practically anything. Something like that.

When I said something like "could do anything," though, I would probably be considering things like solving scientific and human relations issues, connecting people from all parts of the world, and providing information like Wikipedia does, on any number of subjects, all at once. Something like I get the impression companies like IBM are doing. What I would not have seen, though, is this sort of "machine" working in ways that seem less important (Survivor spoiling) and much, much more important (translating to political power).

I'm going to go ahead and get this out of the way: Yes, I did just make a value judgment in using the term "important". No, I am not ashamed that I'm doing this. I watch the Bachelor. Every season. Occasionally I read forums that are similar to what Jenkins describes: they predict what the ending will be based on information that has been gathered and spoil the end of the show (he gives her a rose and she walks away, he calls his ex-girlfriend while he's on camera...and so on). While I acknowledge that the Bachelor is unimportant, I choose to spend my time on it.

What I found even more interesting than the ability to make these fun, unimportant parts of our life more entertaining, if we enjoy spoiling the ending and sticking it to the man, so to speak, was that theorists consider how this could mean political power for those involved. The ability to "push back" can be interpreted in any number of ways, but what fascinates me about the idea is that this means politics might not really be so personal as we often think. Now, no one really debates that unions and big companies can exert a lot of power, but we generally think of their people as an extension of the money that they're willing to spend.
These groups of collective intelligence, knowledge communities, are formed of members who choose, with nothing other than their personal pleasure and satisfaction as payment, to remain pieces of the group.
Political power seems like a really good reason to want to be in a group like this, but the questions then would be to what extent the group could maintain its power, how only those who contribute to the knowledge of the community would have that power, and on and on.
But back to what I was trying to get to with this altering how we think of politics. I feel like I've rambled a little, but I think I may have a point.

When we vote, we value the ability to have a secret ballot. We want to have as much direct access to our representatives as possible, and we really do, especially at the state and local levels. If our representatives don't listen, we can raise money and run against them or find someone else who can. We put up yard signs, wear buttons, and put bumper stickers on our cars. Unless we start considering how much our vote really fits into the nationwide popular vote or something like that, we generally can see our individual impact on politics. Every once in a while this is reinforced when we have a State Rep. win an election by twelve votes, like Rep. Howard did last November.

The idea that we can do a lot together isn't new. But the idea that some of these things, based on a combination of knowledge, can be swayed by a group seems sort of profound. PACs and parties could be examples of political groups with common ideologies, but I think the idea of knowledge communities is a little more than that. I'm not sure exactly what this means, going forward, if anything, for our political system, but it sure seems like it would change things. Any ideas?