Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Pdf, Epub, Ebook

COGNITIVE SURPLUS: CREATIVITY AND GENEROSITY IN A CONNECTED AGE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Shirky leaves few tangents and alleys unexplored, and the connections he makes to the history of gin drinking during the Industrial Revolution, to Gutenberg and his printing of indulgences, and to research on civil society, generosity, and economics are rich and enjoyable. I felt like I got a good bit of the what and the how, and the who including the who not , but I never really gathered the why - why is cognitive surplus good? View 1 comment. Shirky makes the point that we use our spare time to collaborate in ways that could be for the civic betterment of society. Shirky argues that since the s, people are learning how to use free time more constructively for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration. But now, he argues, we have the opportunity — via the low-friction medium of the internet — to organise ourselves and do something in concert. That large corporations have traditionally been the best way to organize people was more of a result of the tools of the time than an inherent need in society. But I absolutely disagree with Shirkey's crystal clear distinction between consumption and production. It's good; puts a lot of what's happening with social and not-so-social media into context and, more important, uses global examples of which we haven't all heard already part of the problem with any book that deals with the age of global connectivity is the domination by Americans and their ethno-cultural-centricity when reporting on what works and what doesn't - some of us will never indulge in the Zappos customer service experience and it's time someone acknowledged that, which Shirky does. Technology takes iteration; society oft seems like it can ill afford the chaos and upheaval required to revamp ideas or implement procedural fixes. Surely it is small but these discussions can spread like viruses through simpler means--a conversation at work or school the next day. Media is cross-curricular, but there is a lack of continuity in the anecdotal pointers and analogies that explore concepts such as: Participatory culture, cognitive surplus abundance of free time over past scarcity , democratisation of internet content provision, the post-Gutenberg economics of the intern Alarmingly nebulous. Jun 24, Ryan Shea added it. He describes a number of common pitfalls that relate to an old information and media economy and how changes are already here that invite people to connect with each other around what they love, share and produce to different social goods, and break past gatekeepers of culture and risk. The main criticism of Shirky is that he is not realistic about the many possible ways we might waste this cognitive surplus, or worse, the many terrible ways it can and is being used for destructive and criminal activities, for example the global Jihadist movement. The experiment demonstrates the backfiring of an attempt to regulate group collaboration; when attempting to do so by ascribing monetary values to people's time, a community will then begin to view people who provide services as the service itself rather than as individuals. This is a big deal. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. Jan 13, Sara rated it really liked it. He really doesn't. For Shirky, one suspects that's not enough. It would likewise ring strangely in the ears of the leaders of the civil rights movement, who used a concerted strategy of nonviolent protest as a means of addressing an abundance-obsessed white American public who couldn't find the time to regard racial inequality as a pressing social concern. Why bother paying to produce if viewers are already providing the lion's share, especially if your getting it for free? With the evidence from Benkler and Nissenbaum , it is concluded that social motivations reinforce personal ones. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Writer

Alarmingly nebulous. Views Read Edit View history. Enlarge cover. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Prior to his appointment at NYU, Mr. I think this books has powerful implications for what the future of innovation will look like and who will power it. We collectively aren't just a source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness. The Western Cold War attitude has spawned a delusion about the power of information spreading to topple authoritarian regimes. A better question is this: Is their behaviour rewarding a desire for autonomy, or for competence? A regular keynote speaker at tech conferences, he has never believed that technology is an end in itself; rather it is our use of technology that matters. Or there's Wikipedia, where anyone can edit pages; Shirky with help from an IBM expert calculates that creating Wikipedia's content has, since , consumed m cumulative hours of human thought. Download as PDF Printable version. Old uses for new technology that went unheralded by technological radicals and media traditionalists alike. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. In fact, were this preference for the professional universally applied, we would all be patronizing prostitutes—they are, after all, far more experienced in their craft than most of us will ever be. I'll be using this as a required text in my history of media course. The so called boob tube. Sure, the internet helps us to be more efficiently organized--but it is not essential to the enterprises. Clay Shirky maintains that almost any non-passive activity is preferable. The problem, he said, is a filtering issue. Shirky has stated that he is interested in exploring "the changes in the way people collaborate" [4] that are spurred on by technology and new media, and these changes are a large part of what Cognitive Surplus is devoted to examining. Cognitive Surplus is already aging badly, with the WikiLeaks furor showing just how little web-based traffic in raw information, no matter how revelatory or embarrassing, has upended the lumbering agendas of the old nation-state on the global chessboard of realpolitik—a place where everything has a price, often measured in human lives. The narrative about the drought-stricken pools proved an important point: the intended capabilities of something do not necessarily determine its functions. It brought people together to carve out enough collective good-will from the community to create resources that no one could have imagined years ago. We live in amazing times. Since most people have a hour work week, there they have surplus time on their hands to do as they wish. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program ITP , where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. Overall Shirkey has a more optimistic view of all this--while I agree with his overall analysis, the cynic in me says that most, if not all of these self-generating communities, will be co-opted by capitalism, purchased, converted to hierarchies and rule-based organizations. For example, he criticizes Shirky's idealising of amateurism:. In the two years since the publication of Cognitive Surplus , the ubiquity of high definition streaming video has transformed the internet from a sea of text to a mountain of video. Shirky should find some examples that are more relevant to the subject of his book! But--and this is a big but--some of the anecdotal examples cited by Shirky have absolutely nothing to do with cognitive surplus. Moments and moments where I had to stop and think a bit more about what was in front of me. I imagine that most generations feel like it's all going to heck in a handbasket at some point, which is comforting. Unlike the alchemists of their time, The Invisible College shared information with each other in order to further the field rather than claim individual advancements as their own. The use of this public access media is to reach audiences that are like the group. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Namespaces Article Talk. In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. He also shares with his readers that SixDegrees was the first social networking website, not Facebook and Friendster as everyone had previously thought. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups. He appeared as an expert witness on internet culture in Shea vs. Clay Shirky main The term "cognitive surplus" refers to the surplus of "intellect, energy, and time" that people have. Jan 26, Cara M rated it it was ok Shelves: technoculture. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Reviews Something that makes today remarkable is that we can treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects. He also describes what makes some of the communities and cultures exciting as they emerge from our changes in technology. In practice, however, proposers tend to offer fair deals and responders tend to reject unfair proposals. Despite extensive examples, some from well ran studies, I still feel a lot of what he shares are his opinions informed I should add, he's a smart guy and to a degree still require some quantification. Sharers have always had the same interests-or motivations- it is the opportunity that has changed them, and the ability to connect, share, and learn easily. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. According to the author, worldwide, people watch an average of twenty hours of television a week, the equivalent of a part-time job, and Americans watch billion hours each year. Furthermore, he questions the intrinsic value of time spent online as a lot of time spent online may be used for things like gambling and porn. The "where" is pretty straightforward: 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure time. While I was required to read this book for my course I was not required to enjoy it or find it interesting. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. The term "cognitive surplus" refers to the surplus of "intellect, energy, and time" that people have. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from July Pages containing links to subscription-only content. It was a service developed to help citizens track outbreaks of ethnic violence in Kenya. Assuming that everything we touch will have a bidirectional communication paradigm, is far from truth. These motivations could also be classified into personal and social motivations. And, even more sadly, studies show that those who watch tv are less happy, mor We live in amazing times. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Last year, in fact, Americans watched about two hundred billion hours of television. Because one thing that Shirky never talks about is the economics behind all these creative production behaviours. In fact, were this preference for the professional universally applied, we would all be patronizing prostitutes—they are, after all, far more experienced in their craft than most of us will ever be. This inducement is powerful enough that the difference is worth paying for. While reading this book, stay objective and use it as a platform to think around how our motivations relate to the use of knowledge and free time with a goal of having more impact in dramatically improving our lives as a society Nov 07, tyto rated it it was ok. Other functions of the critic, such as interpreting its chef's intentions or relating it to the history of a particular cuisine, remain, but the overall value of the reviewer's work shrinks Aug 07, Jane Friedman rated it really liked it. While I was required to I originally read this book because it was required for my graduate level Information Communities course. The author has some very good points. Just because an activity is novel and online, does not mean that it represents a use of cognitive surplus. But Americans spend about m hours watching TV adverts each weekend. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi. In Shirky's case, it's talking about how it is restructuring individuals, their identities as autonomous citizens, and how social media enables collaboration, cooperation and coordination as such.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Read Online

The book documents a number of ways that group online efforts have produced surprising results. Social motivations include membership and sharing, while personal motivations include competence and autonomy. Shirky has stated that he is interested in exploring "the changes in the way people collaborate" [4] that are spurred on by technology and new media, and these changes are a large part of what Cognitive Surplus is devoted to examining. Since this book was published, for example, we have seen sea changes in access and freedom of information battles in China and parts of the Middle East. We live in amazing times. Technology takes iteration; society oft seems like it can ill afford the chaos and upheaval required to revamp ideas or implement procedural fixes. This is not, I should caution, to brand Shirky as a latter-day apologist for slavery but rather to note that it's an exceptionally arrogant tic of privilege to tell one's economic inferiors, online or off, what they do and do not love, and what the extra-material wellsprings of their motivation are supposed to be. The narrative about the drought-stricken pools proved an important point: the intended capabilities of something do not necessarily determine its functions. Fine, we didn't organise a charity in which we brought water to the homeless and solar energy piped in from the Sahara. Information Society. The case studies and stories are the heart of this book. I did zone out a couple of times when he goes a bit into theory, but the mix of anectodes and examples helps to bring you back in. The term "cognitive surplus" refers to the surplus of "intellect, energy, and time" that people have. Jan 26, Cara M rated it it was ok Shelves: technoculture. Jun 24, Ryan Shea added it. He juxtaposes this with the ways previous generations wasted away spare time watching TV. In the fourth chapter, Shirky explores how means and motives alone cannot explain new uses for our cognitive surplus, explaining that we take the opportunities made available to us. While I was required to read this book for my course I was not required to enjoy it or find it interesting. I suspect, though, that the mass media companies are fighting back. The main criticism of Shirky is that he is not realistic about the many possible ways we might waste this cognitive surplus, or worse, the many terrible ways it can and is being used for destructive and criminal activities, for example the global Jihadist movement. Other functions of the critic, such as interpreting its chef's intentions or relating it to the history of a particular cuisine, remain, but the overall value of the reviewer's work shrinks Paperback edition. In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. Ultimately, I did not feel that the book gives a good sense of why connection is good for humanity in the abstract. We collectively aren't just a source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness. You wouldn't steam open people's letters and insert magazines ads, but that's sometimes how we seem to behave. Sep 13, Tiffany rated it really liked it. Mar 23, Alex rated it liked it. His hierarchy of creative collaboration, then, is a celebration of a stereotypically male kind of participation at the expense of a stereotypically female kind of engagement. It is damaging to pretend we are somewhere different when on a computer. And if you are shaky on your Alexander Pope analyses, feel free to keep thinking that everything is going to work out fine. In Cognitive Surplus , Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. He currently works at New York University , where he "has been making the case that the Internet is an inherently participatory and social medium". He describes a number of common pitfalls that relate to an old information and media economy and how changes are already here that invite people to connect with each other around what they love, share and produce to different social goods, and break past gatekeepers of culture and risk. He shows us effectively that we can not only make better use of our time, but also, that technology enables us to do so in a way that maximizes our ability to share and communicate. Original Title. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi. https://files8.webydo.com/9583864/UploadedFiles/689CB9A3-2E26-0F5F-DA67-A59274CA9263.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9584007/UploadedFiles/8600C0E5-9621-63FB-FFEC-400BA7222A62.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9582786/UploadedFiles/4FBEA6B9-D10C-A18D-8AC1-1310160B8BA3.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9583294/UploadedFiles/8E6E2659-D109-C7F1-2186-048C76EBFFA2.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9583721/UploadedFiles/CC7300A0-18EB-0C33-2D4B-B8F4C7A92C77.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9583779/UploadedFiles/510A60E5-4F45-2D65-2EE8-DF135EFBE308.pdf