This is a hard bit

Background:
I have been collecting jokes from random individuals by standing in public places and holding a sign that promises £1 for each novel joke. So far I have 40 jokes

A photograph taken by Noel Cottrell

[excerpt from diary]
...
I know that this project is about social capital and interactions we perform that involve bargains. But now that I have 40 videos of random people telling jokes I feel stuck. **what am I going to do now?**
I could go for another round of asking students and friends to illustrate a joke at a time thus making the entire endeavour crowd sourced. But what will that stand for?
I could also try gathering more jokes by only asking and not offering money to allow for comparison, but I feel this avenue is too simplistic. I need to find my so what? For this project. so what if I'm making a book which is crowd sourced? Even more accurately - so a collection of crowd sourced  jokes can be acquired, filmed and edited... So what?
I will try to spell out what I think of this subject:
Together, collectively we can be very smart and sophisticated. But the fact that individually we seem impressionable needs to be explained. I believe that this can be seen as analogues to the way we try out new foods to determine how we like them. This process requires that we first taste the food, see if we enjoy the flavour. Then we eat it based on that decision, then see how it affected us afterwards. We remember this by experience and so we make up our mind. And in my case, not make up my mind and periodically try everything That did not disagree with me too strongly even If I did not love it.
I imagine that even the initial tasting involves countless nerves and biological processes. The implication to the analogy is that in order to be able to make the collective decision (which I believe changes constantly) we the individuals are acting as the nerve ending and we feed back to the crowd using our social tools. Our tools for providing this feedback are our computers and mobile phones with the internet as the mode of delivery.

If we return to the food analogy then it's interesting to note that I, at least, get most of my information about food (even food I already had) from the internet, and that this information often changes how and what I eat.

In case this doesn't make sense, I think that the choice to use my iphone as the tool for capturing the jokes is highly appropriate - I just don't know what I'm trying to say by that...

...

[end]